The Life Of Sir William Osler -vol-i St

THE LIFE OF

SIR WILLIAM OSLERa

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Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNiVERSin

THE LIFE OF

SIR WILLIAM OSLER

BY

HARVEY CUSHING

VOL. I

‘ Thus there are two books from whence I collect my
divinity : besides that written one of God, another of
his servant nature, that universal and public manuscript,
that lies expansed unto the eyes of all ; those that never
saw him in the one, have discovered him m the other.’

Rehgio Media

'Third Impression

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1925

Printed m England

TO MEDICAL STUDENTS

IN THE HOPE THAT SOMETHING OF OSLEr’s SPIRIT
MAY BE CONVEYED TO THOSE OF A GENERATION
THAT HAS NOT KNOWN HIM ; AND PARTICULARLY TO
THOSE IN AMERICA, LEST IT BE FORGOTTEN WHO
IT WAS THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO
WORK AT THE BEDSIDE IN THE WARDS

B ecause of OsleCs interest m the history of
his profession the effort has been made in
these volumes to bring him into proper alignment
with that most remarkable period in the annals
of Medicine through which he lived and of which
he was part.

Those who knew him best will appreciate the
difficulties of compiling these present records,
which are memoires pour servir. Little pretence
is made in them to do much more than let his
story so far as possible tell itself through what
he puts on paper.

His rare personality, spirit, and character stand
out m his recovered letters, brief though they are.
An appraisal of his professional accomplishments
need not at present be attempted. Here are
merely the outlines for the final portrait, to be
painted out when the colours, lights, and shadows
come in time to be added — colours and lights
chiefly, for only one heavy shadow is cast, just
before the end.

The author herewith expresses his deep grati-
tude to the many whose names occur in the
following pages, and to a still larger number whose
names do not, yet who have equally lightened his
labour of love by innumerable kindnesses.

Oxford,

August 1924.

. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

PART I

THE CANADIAN PERIOD, 1849-1884

Bond Head a7id Dundas.

Chapter I. 1849-1864. The settlement of Upper Canada, 3. Feathei-
stone Osier and Ellen Pickton, 5. Osier’s ancestry, 6. The parsonage at
Bond Head, 12. A frontier childhood, 16 The move to Dundas, 19.
Early school days, 21.

Chapter II. 1864-1867. The Barrie Grammar School, 23. The ^Barrie
Bad Boys’, 24. ‘Father’ Johnson, and reminiscences of the school at
Weston, 26 The School Piefect, 32. Athletic prowess, 35. Early
inteiest in natural history, 3^* ‘Father’ Johnson’s field note-book, 37*
Introduction of James Bovell, 3^* injured leg, 4I The Diatomaceae

and fresh-water Polyzoa, 44. Choice of career, 46.

Toronto,

Chapter III. 1867-1870. Trinity College, 47. James Bovell and his
influence, 48 Introduction to the " Religio Medici’, 50, The Church
abandoned foi Medicine, 53 ‘ The Toronto Medical School, 53 ’ Theo ogy
versus Science, 54. First appearance in print, 55. Finding of the Trichina
spirahs^ 59. Biological leanings, 6l. Reminiscences of Bovell, 68.

Montreal,

Chapter IV. 1870-1872. The McGill Medical School, 70. Corre-
spondence with Johnson, 73 * Studies on the Entozoa, 76. Bovell enters
the Church, 78. The Carlyle passage, 8l. R. Palmer Howard, 83.
A graduation piize thesis, 84

Chapter V. 1872-1874. Post-graduate study abioad, 86. Ophthalmo-
logy in his mind, 91, Burdon Sanderson’s laboratory, 91. Offer of
Chair in Botany at McGill, 96 ‘Walking the hospitals’, 100. A first
visit to Norwich, 102. Discovery of the blood platelets, 104* Berlin, io6,
Virchow, no. Vienna, 115 London again, with the report of his
researches, 117.

Chaptei^VL 1874-1875. Medical practice m Dundas, 120. Cementing
friendships, -121. The Institutes of Medicine at McGill, 12 3. Sphyta 7 iura
Osleri, 125 Physiology lectures, 126. Fathei Johnson’s troubles, 127.
First valedictory, 129. Appointed professor, 130. Jomnai Club, 13 1.
The Hartnack microscopes, 132. The Montreal Geneial and the smallpox^
waids, 133. No. 26 Beavei Hall Hill, 137. Johnson’s \isit, 138,
Revivifying the Medico-Chiruigical Society, 141.

Chapter VII. 1876-1877, Attack of smallpox, 143 The Someuille
Lecture on tiichinosis, I43. The Microscopical Club, I44 Pathologist to
the Montreal General, 145. Coriespondence with Johnson, 147 'Canadian
Fresh-water Polyzoa 15 1. Veterinaiy inteiests, 151 Tadousac, 1 55.
Registrar of School, 156. Di. Bullei’s household, 157. The Dining Club,
160, Pathological Reports No I, 162.

Chapter VIII 1878-1880 Hog cholera studies, 164 Appointment
to the Montreal General, 166. Abroad with George Ross, 166. Sii
George Savage’s reminiscences, 167. The new physiological laboratory, 171.
Medico-Chirurgical Society meetings, 172. No 1351 St. Catherine Street,
175. Alexis St. Martin, 178. Pathological Repot ts No II, 179. Egerton
Y, Davis introduced, 181. Death of Johnson and of Bovell, 184

Chapter IX. 1881-1883. Fresh-water Polyzoa again, 186. Intel -
national Medical Congiess in London, 189. Lake Memphremagog, 192.
A laboratoiy manual, 193. Interest in paiasites, 194 Ceiebral topograph),
195, Studies on trichinosis and echinococcus, 197 Koch’s discover) of
the tubercle bacillus, 199 McGill semi-centennial, 201. Writing foi the
Medical News^ 202. F.R.C.P., 203. Harvard centennial, 206. Studies

on endocarditis, 207.

Chapter X. 1884. Abioad with Jared Howard, 210. Berlin letteis,
2 1 1. Koch and Virchow, 212. A start in bacteriology, 216 Leipzig
letters, 216 The call to Philadelphia, 219. Hoiatio Wood, 221. Weir
Mitchell looks him over, 222. Parting tubutes, 226. His reasons for
acceptance, 227. Looking back, 228.

PART II

THE UNITED STATES, 1884-1905

Philadelphia.

Chapter XL 1884-1885. House hunting, 233 A piofessor of anew
orciei, 234. Status of medical education, 236. Making friendships, 238.
Egeiton y. Davis again, 239 Editorial writing, 242. The Biological
Club, 243. Joseph Leidy, 244. Alfred Still6, 245 The Goulstonian
Lectures, 246. Philadelphia Pathological Society, 248 Blockley Hospital
autopsies, 251. Altei cation over the Inteinational Medical Congress, 254.
Piesidential addiess, Canadian Medical Association, 258. Foundation of
Association of American Physicians, 260 New medical buildings at
Monti eal, 261. Literary activities, 262.

Chapter XII. 1886-1889. Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, 264.
Consultations and clinics, 266. The use of drugs, 267. Cartwright
Lectures, 268. Association of American Physicians’ liist meeting, 269.
The parasites of malaria, 270. Studies at Blockley, 271. Holiday in
British Columbia, 272. ‘TheMalaiial Germ of Laveran’, 273. Visits the
Johns Hopkins, 275. Inkpot career, 276 Centennial of College of
Physicians, 277 The Lnseminator 279. Therapeutic surveys . pneumonia,
280, typhoid, 281. ‘Notes and Comments’, 282. Examinations, 282.
Equipping a laboratory, 284 Physician to Orthopedic Hospital, 285.
Studies on Choiea, 285* No. 1502 Walnut Street, 287. MitchelFs Lest
tieatment’, 288. ‘Cerebral Palsies of Children’, 291 The ‘Kensington
Colt’, 293. Miss Fisher's death, 295 First Congress of Physicians and
Suigeons, 296. Call to Baltimoie, 297. ‘The Autociat of the Breakfast-
table’, 301. Hospitals and hotels, 303. Palmer Howard’s death, 304.
Phagocytosis, 305. Death of S. W. Gross, 306, ‘ The Licence to

Practise’, 307 ‘ Aequanimitas 308.

Baltimore.

Chapter XIII. 1889-1890. The Johns Hopkins foundation, 31 1
The opening of the hospital, 314 Staff organization, 315 Staff intimacy,
316. Tiacadie visit, 319 209 W. Monument Street, 320. Societies and

journals, 321 Historical Club, 323. Amoebic abscess, 326. Note-
taking, 328 A ‘quinquennial brain-dusting’, 329 Tenth International
Congress, 333. Koch’s pronouncement, 334. ‘Jack ’ Hewetson, 335.

Chapter XIV. 1891-1892. The Text-book of Medicine, 339. Sup-
port of libraries, 343. Beginnings of antituberculosis crusade, 345. Writ-
ing the Text-book, 348. ‘Doctor and Nurse’, 352. Virchow celebration,
355. Text-book published, 357. Mariiage, 362 Lincoln Cathedral, 365.
1 W. Fiankhn Street, 366 ‘Teacher and Student’, 367. Historical
Club, 370. Monti eal call, 372. Miss Ganett’s gift, 373.

Contents of Volume I

xii

Chapter XV. 1893-1894. Oiganization of school, 375. Typhoid
propaganda, *378, Baltimore in the ’90’s, 380. ^Cretinism m America’,
383. Shattuck Lecture, 383. Welch’s laboratory, 385. Opening of
medical school, 388. ‘Diagnosis of Abdominal Tumours', 391. Brevity
of correspondence, 393. ‘The Army Surgeon’, 395. ‘The Leaven of
Science’, 396. Antivivisection bills, 397. Co-education, 398. British
Association Meeting at Oxford, 4O0. Acland’s panel, 40 1. Life at i W
Franklin Street, 406.

Chapter XVI, 1895-1896. ‘ Teaching and Thinking’, 408. ‘Thomas

Dover’, 410. ‘An Alabama Student’, 411. The A. M. A. meeting at
Baltimore, 4I4. First revision of Text-book, 415, Summer at ‘The
Glades’, 417. The typhoid fasciculus, 419. Osier the consultant, 419
Success of Text-book, 422. ‘John Keats’, 423. ‘ Ephemendes 425.

Revere’s birth, 426. Clinical teaching, 428. The daily round, 431. Atten-
dance at medical meetings, 434. ‘Fevers of the South’, 435. Methods
of teaching, 440. Rejuvenation of Maryland ‘Faculty’, 442.

Chapter XVII. 1897-1898. Linacre, Harvey, and Sydenham, 444.
Saturday evenings for students, 445. Conference of Health Officers, 446.
‘Functions of a State Faculty’, 447. Second paper on Cretinism, 448.
Anti vivisection bills again, 449. ‘Nurse and Patient’, 452. Ongin of the
Rockefeller Institute, 454 ‘British Medicine in Greater Britain’, 458
Bronchial attacks, 460. ‘Internal Medicine as a Vocation’, 461. Marry
the right woman, 463. Tramping the country, 465. Outbreak of Spanish-
American War, 468. Fellow of the Royal Society, 469. Dean of the Medical
School, 470. Second revision of Text-book, 471. Charitableness, 472.
Degrees at Edinburgh and Aberdeen, 474. Sydenham’s birthplace, 476.
Pepper’s death, 477. An interiupted holiday, 478. Bionchopneumonia,
480. Back in harness, 483.

Chapter XVIII. 1899. The ‘flighty purpose’, 486. An influenza
epidemic, 487. Typhoid fever and its problems, 487 A blizzard in
Baltimore, 491 Relations with patients, 492. Activating the ‘Faculty’,
493. Trudeau’s visit, 495. Cavendish Lecture, 497. Summer at Swan-
age, 498. Sir Thomas Browne, 501. Tiopical medicine, 503. ‘After
Twenty-five Years’, 503. The diagnosis of typhoid, 507. Home treat-
ment of consumption, 509. ‘ Elisha Bartlett’, 510.

Chapter XIX. 1900. Illness among students, 512. ‘John Locke as a
Physician’, 513. The Edinbuigh call, 515. Acceptance and legrets, 518.
Antivivisection testimony, 520. The Dismal Swamp, 523. Jacobi festival,
525. Summer in England, 527. Jonathan Hutchinson’s polyclinic, 528.
‘Importance of Post-graduate Study’, 528. Sii Thomas Browne’s skull,
530. Royal College of Surgeons centenary, 531. His biother’s illness, 534.
Founding the Laennec Society, 535. Beginnings of ‘social service’, 536.
‘The Influence of the Hospital on the Community’, 539. Third typhoid
fasciculus, 541.

Contents of Volume I

Xlll

Chapter XX. 1901. Perforation in typhoid, 543. ^ Books and Men’

address, 545. Faith a commodity, 546. Death of B. B. ‘Osier, 547.
Saturday evenings, 548. The bath phenomenon, 549 The phoenix
trick, 551. Natural method of teaching, 552. Third revision of Text-
book, 554. Visit to the Dutch clinics, 555. British Congress of Tuber-
culosis, 559. Koch on human and bovine tuberculosis, 561. North
Berwick, 562. Yale bicentenary, 566.

Chapter XXL 1902 The Maryland Tubeiculosis Commission, 569.
Abusing the Mayor, 570. A Hopkins anniversary, 572. Mr. Gates’s
letter, 573. Unexpected revision of Text-book, 577. ^Burrowings of
a Bookwoim’, 579. Medical librarians, 580. Pointe-^-Pic, 584,
‘Chauvinism in Medicine’, 586. The Beaumont address, 590. Bed-
side epigrams, 593 Osler-Vaquez disease, 594 Ochsner’s death, 595.
Reforms in teaching, 596. Ingersoll Lecture invitation, 597.

Chapter XXIL 1903. Reading journals, 600. ‘ Educational Value of

a Medical Society’, 601. Revere’s whooping-cough, 604. Tlie Edinburgh
Theses, 606, The ‘ D. N. B.’ presentation, 608 Mr Henry Phipps’s
gift, 609. The Vernon medallion, 61 1 Summer in Guernsey, 612.
Tnstram Shandy, 614 ‘The Mastei Woid in Medicine’, 6 1 6. Anti-
tubeiculosis crusade, 620. Addiess at Phipps Institute, 620. Revere and
mythology, 624.

Chapter XXIIL 1904 Warning of Oxford call, 626 A tuberculosis
exhibition, 628. The Baltimore fire, 630. Isthmian Canal Commission,
631 Ml. Rockefeller and hospitals, 633. A muddle over tuberculosis
congt esses, 635 Ingersoll Lecture, 638. A pioposal from Harvard, 641.
The Oxfoid call, 642 ^System of Medicine’ projected, 646. Habits
aboard ship, 647 ‘Do not procrastinate’, 649. Osier accepts, 650.
Lazeai memorial, 656. John Locke celebration, 659. Cecil Rhodes’s
death, 661. ‘Ship of Fools’ Club, 662.

Chapter XXIV. 1905 A Hopkins birthday, 664. Opening of Phipps
Dispensary, 665 ‘The Fixed Period’ address, 666. Dethroning an idol,
669. Chaiaka Club dinner, 673. ‘The Student Life’, 676. ‘Unity,
Peace, and Concord’, 678. The Intel urban Club, 680 Farewell dinner in
New York, 681. Last days at i West Franklin Street, 683 Fifth
revision of Text-book, 685.

ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME I

Aet 28 The young piofessor at McGill . . . Frontispiece

Map of Upper Canada of circa 1837 page 9

Featherstone Lake Osier and Ellen Free Pickton Osier , 21

The foimer parsonage at Bond Head .... 24

The old Barrie Grammar School ..... 24

The Weston School in the early days . 31

Drawn by Fathei Johnson.

The four prefects at Weston (Toronto, 1867 ) ... 32

Osier’s three teachers. W. A. Johnson, James Bovell,

R. Palmer Howard . ..... 69

Osier’s sketch of the leucocytes, with a later note . 104

The Young Professors William Osier The lean and yaller
Dl Roslei ’). F. J. Shepherd, and George Ross.

Montreal^ circa 1878 (Photograph, Notman.) . . 182

The clinic at the Orthopedic Hospital . . . 286

Early view of the Johns Hopkins Hospital ... 316

The first group of internes . .... 316

The beech tree at Little Gillians. (Fiom a snapshot taken

by Dr. H. J. Shirley, Jan. lo, 1921) .... 333

Writing the Text-book ‘ Partuiit Osier. Nascitur liber,’ . 349

William Osier ... ... . 360

Grace Revere Osier ...... . 360

No. I West Franklin St, Baltimoie . , . 366

Menu of the American Physiological Society dinner . . 407

‘The Fates.’ (W. S. Halsted, William Osier, H. A.

Kelly ) 445

‘ And on his shoulders not a lamb, a kid ' ’ . . , . 467

Bedside teaching. Inspection ; palpation ; auscultation ; con-
templation. (From snapshots taken by T. W. Clarke.) . 552

The Vernon plaque. (Pans, 1903.) . . . . . 61 1

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN VOE I

A A.P.
A M. A.

B. A.A.S
B. C. H.
B. M. A.
B M. J

CM A.

D. N B.

E. Y. D.

F. RCP.
H. M.S.

J.H H,

J. H. U.

M. G. H.

‘Medico-Chi
M R.CP.

N. A.S.P.T

R CP.

R. P. M.

R. V.H.

S G.L.

S. G. O.

T. B.

U. C
U.P.

Association of American Physicians.

American Medical Association

British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Boston City Hospital.

British Medical Association.

British Medical Jomnal.

Canadian Medical Association

Dictionary of National Biography.

Egeiton Yorrick Davis

Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians

Harvard Medical School.

Johns Hopkins Hospital.

„ „ University.

jMontieal General Hospital.

I Massachusetts Geneial Hospital
.’Medico-Chiiuigical Society (Montreal)

Membei of Royal College of Physicians

National Association for the Study and Prevention of
Tuberculosis,

Royal College of Physicians.

Regius Piofessor of Medicine.

Royal Victoria Hospital (Montreal)

Surgeon-GeneraFs Libraiy (Washington).

„ „ Office.

(Tubercle Bacillus,

(Tuberculosis.

University College (London).

„ of Pennsylvania.

PART I

THE CANADIAN PERIOD

‘Those who have written about him from later
impressions than those of which I speak, seem
to me to give insufficient prominence to his
gaiety. It was his cardinal qualit}^ in those early
days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced from
him , he seemed to skip upon the hills of life.
He was simply bubbling with quips and jests;
his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract
things was incessantl}^ relieved b}^ jocosity ; and
when he had built one of his intellectual castles
in the sand a wave of humour was certain to
sweep m and destroy it. I cannot, for the life
of me, recall an}^ of his ]okes , and WTitten dow n
in cold blood they might not be funny if I did
They were not wit so much as humanit}^ the
many-sided outlook upon life. I am anxious
that his laughter-loving mood should not be
forgotten, because later on it was partly, but
I should think never wholl^q quenched ’

Edmund Gosse on Robert Louis Stevenson

CHAPTER I

BOND HEAD AND DUNDAS

William Osler, the youngest son in a family of nine,
was born July 12, 1849, in a parsonage at Bond Head,
Tecumseth County, near the edge of the wilderness in what
was Upper Canada. How this came about, as to place, time,
and circumstance, needs telling from the very beginning.

One of the old Canadian trails used by voyageur,
missionary, and Indian led from ‘ Muddy York ’ (Toronto)
on Lake Ontario to a landing on the south-eastern end of
Georgian Bay bearing the name of Penetanguishene. This
was a matter of some seventy miles as the crow flies, but
by stream and portage — up the Humber, the long carry
across the low ridges, down the Holland, across Lac aux
Claies (Simcoe), and finally by the Severn River to ‘ Pene-
tang ’ ^ — it must have been so devious as to make the
longer way round, by Niagara and Detroit to Lake Huron
and the Sault, seem the shortest way across this upper-
river portion of the original Province of Quebec.

Geographical obstacles, however, can be energetically
attacked when a military obj ective is in view : and so when
Upper Canada was partitioned off from the Old Province
in 1791 and General John G. Simcoe, who had commanded
a Loyalist corps under Cornwallis during the Revolutionary
War, came to be its first Governor, with the aid of his
soldiers, the ‘ Queen’s Rangers ’, he built a strategic road,
or, more properly speaking, broke trail through forest and
swamp for such a road, in direct line the thirty-eight miles
from York to Holland Landing near the southern arm of
what came to be called Lake Simcoe. This road is now the
celebrated Yonge Street, said to be the longest ‘ street ’ in

^ According to Parkman it was the route to Lake Huron and Micliili-
mackinac followed in 1680 by La Salle in his expedition to relieve Henri de
Tonty, whom he had left the year before at Fort Crevecoeur on the Illinois.

Settlement of Upper Canada 5

of the Gospel and accessible places of worship, and as 'many
of them were members of the Anglican Churchy urgent
calls as time went on were forwarded through the colonial
bishops, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in. Foreign Parts ^ for young clergymen who were unafraid
of the rigours of frontier and wilderness.

There was need of one of these to cover the townships
of Tecumseth and West GwiUimbury, half-way between
Toronto and ‘ Penetang ’, and thus it came about that in
the early summer of 1837 Featherstone Lake Osier and his
young bride Ellen Free Pickton with all their earthly goods,
including a tin box of home-made Cornish gingerbread,
found their way north along Yonge Street as far as Holland
Landing, and thence the following day, as wiU be told, to
a hamlet or cross-roads subsequently known as Bond Head.^

This young couple who hailed from Cornwall were
representatives of very different ethnic types — Anglo-
Saxon and Celt. The clergyman, whose readiness for
a service spiced with adventure may have resulted from
several years of apprenticeship in the Royal Navy, was
reserved in temperament, stocky, fair, grey-eyed, and
broad-headed. His wife, a native of London, adopted by
an uncle in Falmouth, though blessed like her husband
with a good mind in a sound body, was, however, of short
and slender build, and of so dark a complexion that in later
years many who did not know her ancestry assumed that
Indian blood flowed in her veins. But these small, olive-
complexioned English people, sometimes called ‘ black
Celts ’, are thought to be remainders of the original Briton
driven by successive invasions into the inaccessible parts
of Argyllshire, of mountainous Wales, of Western Ireland,

^ Tke original Society, founded m 1649 with the Hon. Robert Boyle as
its first Governor, had as its avowed object, until the separation of the
colonies, ‘ the propagation of the Gospel in New England and the adjoining
parts of America ’

^ From the celebrated Sir Francis Bond Head, then Lieutenant-Governor,
who quelled the insurrection of 1837. Yonge Street was named after
Sir George Yonge, Secretary for War in 1791. Bond Head lay a few miles
off the direct overland route to ‘ Penetang ’, representing the extension of
Yonge Street across the great swamp and through the wilderness of Innisfil
to the west of Lake Simcoe^

6

Bond Head and Dundas

and of Cornwall and Brittany ^ — the regions of Gaelic
speech and crosses.

Another tradition, as old as Tacitus, ascribes this brunette
type to an Iberian infusion, and it is not inconceivable that
the Mediterranean folk who for centuries came for trade,
if not for conquest, mayhap left behind them, in exchange
for Cornish tin, darker skins, and livelier dispositions quite
foreign at least to anything donated to the British character
by Angles or Saxons. However this may be, known to her
schoolmates as ‘ Little Pick old friends in Falmouth
spoke of Ellen Pickton as ‘ a very pretty girl, clever, witty,
and lively, with a power of quick repartee, wilful but good-
tempered, not easily influenced, very faithful in her friend-
ships, and of strong religious principle ’. In these traits
as well as in their personal appearance two of her sons,
Britton and William, closely resembled her.

The Osiers had lived for long in Cornwall, a race of
successful merchants and shipowners for the most part,
and the family was strong in traditions of the sea. In
a fragment of autobiography left by Featherstonc Osier,
he says : ‘ My grandfather Osier died in the West Indies
from the effects of a wound. One uncle was killed in action
with a French privateer. Another was drowned in Stvan
Pool near Falmouth, and a cousin a lieutenant in the Royal
Navy died of yellow fever in the West Indies.’ The
‘ Grandfather Osier ’ here mentioned was Edward, who
had married Joan Drew, the sister of Samuel the Cornish
metaphysician ; and it is not unlikely that from this source
there came into the Osier line a strain which modified the
strongly developed family trait which went to the making
of hard-headed men of business and venturesome mer-
chants. This Edward and Joan left six children, only two
of whom had issue, Edward the father of Featherstonc,
progenitor of the Canadian branch of the family, and
Benjamin, whose descendants are now scattered in the
United States, South Africa, and Australia.^

^ According to W. Z. Ripley’s ‘ Races of Europe 1899, a trace of them
remains in the fen district of East Anglia.

The writer has met a member of the Australian branch, whose likeness
to bir William Oslei in figure, stature, gesture, feature, and shape of head

Family Traits 7

This second Edward became a Falmouth merchant, and
in 1795 married Mary Paddy, who lived to be ninfety-nine,
and was herself the daughter of a shipowner. Of their nine
children there were three particularly notable sons, all of
whom showed outstanding ability coupled with strongly
developed religious tendencies. Edward the eldest son, of
dark complexion and short stature, after a period at Guy’s
Hospital became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons,
a surgeon in the navy, a Fellow of the Linnean Society,
a writer of poems, psalms, and hymns, and a newspaper
editor, who despite all this practised medicine long years in
Truro, Cornwall. If one may judge from the titles of his
three best-known publications,^ his heart wavered between
the navy, the Church, and natural history ; and in him as
physician, naturalist, and author may be recognized many
marks of resemblance, mental and physical, to those possessed
by the nephew with whose traits this memoir is primarily
concerned.

Featherstone Lake, the third son, has just been left with
his bride in Upper Canada, where five years later he is to
be joined by his younger brother Henry Bath, Edward’s
fifth son. For he, also, became a missionary clergyman,
who after a residence of thirty-two years in Lloydtown,
not far from Bond Head, was transferred to York Mills
on Yonge Street north of Toronto. There he continued
as rector for another twenty-eight years, until his death
in 1902 in his eighty-eighth year.* Thus, for the most
part, an enviable longevity has characterized the Osier
family.

Probably all Falmouth boys brought up within the sight
and smell of the sea come to feel its lure, and so it was
with Featherstone Osier, a reckless and daring boy, who

was so striking that he might have passed as a younger brother, though as
a matter of fact their common ancestors were this gentleman’s great-great-
grandfather and grandmother — Edward Osier and Joan Drew. Hence,
though Sir William’s resemblance to his mother was striking, it is evident
that his physical type cannot be laid entirely at her door in view of the close
resemblance between such distant cousins.

^ ‘ The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth ’ ; ^ Church and King ’ ;

* Burrowing and Boring Marine Animals See, Cf. Diet, Nat. Biography.

^ He was made Canon of St. Alban’s, Toronto ; and Rural Dean of York.

8 Bond Head and Dundas

when Very young had been sent inland to a boarding-school
lest he should be drowned. But the appeal was irresistible,
and in his teens he was at sea on a schooner, the Sappho,
bound for the Mediterranean. A dreadful voyage it was,
with storms, a near shipwreck and starvation, adrift for
weeks on the ocean. Undaunted by this experience he
later joined the Royal Navy and went to sea as a cadet.
This time his brig-of-war was wrecked in earnest near the
Barbadoes, and there followed yellow fever and a pest ship
on the way home to face a court-martial, as is the custom
when a ship-of-war is lost, from whatever cause. Then to
sea ag ain as sub-lieutenant on a ‘ crack ’ frigate, the ■Tribune-,
and four full years of cruising in remote seas ensued, with
much of interest and excitement that might be quoted
from the journals which, sailor-fashion, he kept during this
period. At the end of this long absence, when word came
that his father was in poor health and wished to see him
before he died, he threw up his prospects in the navy
despite a tempting offer from the Admiralty to remain in
service, and in 1832 left his ship at Rio and returned to
Falmouth. Shelved from the navy by his decision, and
having often entertained the thought of taking Holy
Orders, after some preliminary studying of Latin and
Greek he entered St. Catherine's Hall, Cambridge, in
October 1833, and was elected Mathematical Scholar of
the college at the first examination. Here, he says, he
‘ read very hard and looked forward to the prospect of
obtaining a high degree and settling down in England in
a quiet parish ’ — ^with Ellen Pickton as his wife, it may be
added, for they had become engaged not long after his
return. But this was not to be : it was made dear that
his duty lay dsewhere and he could not refuse the call :

It was desired that I should go to Canada early in the spring.
Before doing so I had to pass the University Examinations, take my
degree, pass the examination for Holy Orders, be ordained, get
married and make all necessary preparations for leaving England.
This I was enabled to do by the University allowing me to pass my
examinations a term before the usual time, though by so doing my
name would not appear on the Honour List. The Bishop of London
also kindly admitted me to examination two months before the
ordinary time, and gave me letters dismissory to the Archbishop

Featherstone Osier’s Journal 9

of Canterbuiy by whom I was ordained in Lambeth Palade early
in March 1837.

I had been married early in the previous month, and made arrange-
ments to sail in the barque Bragtla some time during April, Henry
Scadding (then a Divinity student) to be our fellow-passenger.
On April 65 1837, sailed from Falmouth for Quebec, and after
a tedious passage of seven weeks and a half, having narrowly escaped
shipwreck on Egg Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, landed in
Quebec, and were warmly received by Bishop Mountain . . .

After a stay of eight days in Quebec we proceeded on our journey
towards Toronto, and, that we might not lose sight of our luggage,
took the route from Montreal and via the Rideau Canal to Kingston,
thence by steamer to Toronto. Here we were cordially welcomed
by the Archdeacon who informed us that the Rev. H. O’Neil had
made all necessary arrangements as to our future residence. We
lemained four days in Toronto, then resuming our journey north-
ward reached Holland Landing late that same evening, slept there,
and the afternoon of the following day arrived at Tecumseth in
safety, after driving over roads such as we had never seen before.
So bad were they that the driver, with a pair of strong horses, after
driving us ten miles to what was then called the Corners (afterwards
Bond Head) positively refused to take us the remaining two or three
miles, declaring it would kill his horses to do so. Here, after pro-
curing refreshments we got fiesh horses and drove to the residence
of a farmer named Mairs, where Mr. O’Neil had secured for us the
only accommodation to be had in the parish. It consisted of a tiny
sitting-room and an apology for a bedroom. Our entire luggage had
to be stored in a barn. Poor as was our accommodation, we were
thankful to have reached our journey’s end.

Bond Head

For the first few months, indeed for the first few years,
these young people endured a life of actual hardship. The
nearest post-office was at Holland Landing twelve miles
away ; the nearest doctor fifteen miles away at New-
market ; the nearest blacksmith six miles away, and the
roads permitting access to them were much of the time
wellnigh impassable. The two townships were sparsely
settled, and it was a most difficult matter for the young
clergyman to carry out what he regarded as the duties of
his pastorate.

The white settlers in Simcoe County at this time were
of many sorts, though the Indians possibly still out-

lo Bond Head and Dundas

numbered themd Among the ‘ U. E. Loyalists ' there was
a body of Quaker settlers from Pennsylvania who had taken
up grants on the northern slopes of the Ridges, and around
Holland Landing was a smattering of Lord Selkirk’s
colonists, mostly Sutherlandshire Highlanders, who in
canoes had despairingly made their way back from the
Red River country, when lawlessness reigned during the
struggle between the Great Companies for supremacy in
the fur trade.^ There were, too, a few French Canadians,
but perhaps the majority of the more recent colonists,
from 1830 on, were Irish, with a predominance of ardent
Orangemen from Ulster, who will be heard of again.

But in a new country a minister, whatever his denomina-
tion, is welcome, and in the County of Simcoe — where many
of the settlers had not seen a Protestant clergyman for years,
their children remaining unbaptized and uninstructed —
whenever Featherstone Osier appeared all within reach for
miles around attended service; none the less eagerly that
the setting must be in some farmer’s unchinked log barn.
A better place of worship was an outstanding need, and he
set to work with his accustomed energy to erect a church
before considering what would seem to be still more essen-
tial, a dwelling for himself. However, the people were
poor, money was scarce, and building materials impossible
to get, for as there were no saw- mills near dry lumber
was not to be had; and, what is more, 1837, as it may be
remembered, was the year of the disorder associated with
the abortive rebellion engineered by William L. MacKenzie,
the first mayor of Toronto. Nevertheless, somehow a
church for each township was finally got under cover, and
as they were only seven miles apart, the young clergyman
could manage a Sunday sermon in each place, as well as

^ These were mostly Chippcwas (Ojibways). The Huions whom
Champlain found in this country the century before had been exterminated.
The counties adjacent to York and Simcoe contained many Iroquois, par-
ticularly Mohawks from New York, whose chief, Joseph Brant, under the
influence of Sir William Johnson, had sided with the British on the revolt of
the colonies.

^ Many years later Sir William Osier purchased and sent to the library at
Winnipeg some of Lord Selkirk’s journals, which he had picked up at a sale
m London.

The Edge of the Wilderness 1 1

an afternoon service in a stable at Bond Head, lay

half-way between.

Meanwhile, their own living conditions were nearly
intolerable, even for two stout-hearted young people, and
Ellen Osier years later as a grandmother would tell how
her husband was ^ away from Tuesday till Friday each week
as a general thing, riding on horseback through the woods
and swamps, over trails and corduroy roads, the bridges
over the wetter parts of the swamps, where there was no
footing, being made of floating logs fastened together —
this floating road at one place being two miles long and
very insecure it was, for the logs dipped and shifted ^

The clergyman himself has left a vivid account of these
days, not only in a journal he kept as an aid in preparing
his regular reports for his superiors, but in a fragmentary
autobiographical sketch ^ which states :

At the expiration of our three months we found we had to leave
our quarters, and where to go we knew not. At length a hut was
found, in w^hich cattle had been kept. Several women of the parish
met together and cleaned it as far as it was possible, and into this
we moved for the winter, our clothing, trunks, &c., having to be
kept in a barn three-quarters of a mile off. The hut was surrounded
by dead trees, and, with the exception of wolves, no living creatures
were within a third of a mile from us. Part of the winter my good
wife spent at Newmarket where our first son, Featherston, was
born, during which time I lived alone, chinking up the holes in the
hut with snow and cooking my own food. It was so lonely that no
servant would live there.

When the spring opened even this poor accommodation had to be
given up, a farmer needing it for his cattle. After much search
a log house about twelve feet square with loose boards as flooring
was found at West Gwillimbury. A stable three-quarters of a mile
from it was secured, and all our luggage, beyond absolute necessaries,
was stored in a bain three miles distant. The utter discomfort to
which we w^ere subjected began to affect our health. The hut in
which we were living was on the roadside, far from any house, and
we had to depend upon the parishioners to bring us wood for fuel.
This they would occasionally forget to do, and we had at times to
go to bed in the day to keep ourselves warm.

^ These journals have been privately printed by his sons — ‘ Records of
the Lives of Ellen Free Pickton and Featherstone Lake Osler.^ The Oxford
University Press, 1919, 4to, 257 pp.

I 2

Bond Head and Dundas

The' nest spring an acre of ground was given and money-
subscribed for a parsonage, ‘ a cottage 30 x 40, the people
engaging to erect a stable Here on the crest of a low
hill by the roadside, a long mile to the north of Bond Head
Corners, they finally took up their residence, and ere long
Trinity Church was built near by on the lower slope of
the hill. So they may be pictured, he at home with his
family and local parish from Friday to Tuesday, but away
on the other days on horseback and alone, -with the baptismal
register ^ in his saddle-bag, covering a huge territory to
the north as far as Penetanguishene and as far south as
Thornhill, establishing congregations and opening Sunday-
schools. His ministrations often took him into districts so
remote he could only reach them twice a year, and as
there were few post-oflSces he would have to announce the
day of the subsequent visit three to six months hence as
the case might be, ‘ and without any other notice the
congregation would be waiting at the time specified

Ellen ^Osler, meanwhile, not only had the responsibility
of a rapidly accumulating flock of her own, but conducted
a famed Sunday-school to which children came from miles
around. She also established a celebrated sewing-school, foi :

. . . Observing how ignorant the girls were and ho-vv untidily they
dressed, she proposed to give instruction in cutting out and rnaking
their clothes eve^ Tuesday and Friday in the afternoon. Soon
a class of twenty-eight girls and young v, omen were gathered together,
who instead of commg in the afternoon would come in the morning,
remaining the whole day, anxious for instruction. That school did
more towards elevating the tone of the people than almost anything
else, and to this day many of the women of Tecumseth, now mothers
and grandmothers, speak of it as one of the greatest blessings of iheii
lives.

The low one-story parsonage with such a couple in
residence naturally became in time the social as well as

This register of marriages, baptisms, and births is still preserved in the
parish church, Bond Head, and contains entries of christenings not infre-
quently as many as fifteen a day. Among them is that of William Osier,
and on the same page that of the father of Dr* Banting, the recent discoverer
0 Insulin. The church contains the white-oak benches from the original
building that stood by the Osier parsonage, but of which no trace now
remains.

The Osier Parsonage 13

the religious centre of the region. The neighbouring
farms, mostly 200-acre grants, began to be taken up by
those who became intimates and friends of parents and
offspring, for children were born to those early settlers in
generous numbers. In the parsonage itself in the course
of the first fourteen years all but two of the nine Osier
children came into the world. As his father’s journal
relates, Featherston ^ the eldest was born in Newmarket
during the first winter, and the second son, Britton,®
known in the family as ‘ B. B.’, the following year in Bond
Head.

The year 1841 found the father somewhat broken in
health, with a bad cough and an abscess in the back caused
by the continuous riding on horseback, necessitating a rest
and change. A much-needed vacation with a sojourn in
England was therefore taken, and on their return some
months later, with their Falmouth-born daughter, Ellen
Mary, they found ‘ upwards of sixty wagon-loads of people ’
gathered at Holland Landing to escort them the twelve
miles to the rectory. In renewed vigour the active life
of a frontier parson was again resumed. The church was
enlarged with funds donated at home, and the business ability
of his merchant forebears began to show itself in his relations
to his parishioners in matters temporal as well as spiritual.
He taught them farming, and how to make husbandry
pay, lent them money, drew up wills for them, dispensed
spectacles, and in countless other ways tended to their
material and physical as well as spiritual needs.

In a country with an almost unbroken primeval forest,
clearing the land for farming is a slow process, and Bond

^ The Hon Featherston Osier (b. Jan 4, 1838) entered the law, practising
in Toronto (1860-79) appointed Justice of the Court of Appeal for
Ontario (1879-1910). On his retirement from the bench he was chosen
President of the Toronto General Trusts Corporation and served in that
capacity until his death in 1924 at 86 years of age.

2 Britton Bath Osier Q>. June 19, 1839 5 5 > ^ 9 °^) Graduating in

Toronto in 1862, he entered the law, and as Queen’s Counsel and the leading
figure at the Canadian bar his name became a household word in Canada,
where he was called ‘ the thirteenth juryman’. He is said to have been the
most brilliant of all the brothers. Physically he bore a close resemblance
to his brother William.

Bond Head and Dundas

14

Head, 'largely surrounded by ‘ stump farms was still on
the edge' of the wilderness. The elder children well re-
member migratory visits of Chippewa Indians to the
parsonage, numbers of whom, indeed, were drawn by
curiosity to attend the Sunday services ; and it is related
that one of them, pointing at a child, as dark of com-
plexion as his mother, who lay in a cradle on the parsonage
verandah, grunted, ‘ Papoose, papoose which aroused a
fear that some day they might run away with him. In
1842, the year after their return from England, the third
son, Edward Lake, was born, and three years later Edmund.^
In 1847 came twins, Charlotte (the ‘ Chattie ’ of subsequent
letters) and Francis, who had a roving disposition, and like
his father went off to sea in his early years. The son
William was born as stated on July 12, 1849,
years later a daughter Emma, who died in her third year.
Walter Farquhar rather than William was to have been
this last son’s name, presumably in honour of the patron of
the Upper Canada Clergy Society, but pressure of an
unexpected sort was brought to bear on this subject.

Bond Head was by this time a growing village of some
two hundred souls, and boasted not only of a doctor,
Orlando Orr, who officiated at the births of the younger
Osier children, but of a school-house, a blacksmith-shop,
a tavern, and a lodge. For some years it had been the
custom of the Orangemen of the district to gather here
for their annual fete-day on July 12th ; and adorned with
sashes, rosettes, and yellow lilies it was part of their pro-
gramme to march, to the tune of ‘ Teeter Tawter Holy
Water behind their cockaded leader on his white horse,
from the Corners the mUe or so to Mr. Osier’s parsonage,
where speeches were made and felicitations offered in
return. In view of this well-established custom, it w'as

1 Sir Edmund Boyd Osier, b. Nov 20, 1845 ; d. Aug. 4, 1924, inherited
through his father the business ability for which his ancestors were renowned.
As a financier he had been for years an important figure in Canadian affairs,
being the head of one of the most important brokerage houses in Canada,
President of the Dominion Bank, Director of the Canadian Pacific Railway
and many other companies ; he was a member of the Canadian House of
Commons for many years. In physical type he closely resembled his father
Edward Lake also became a barrister, and practised in the North West.

The Orangemen’s Fete-Day 15

inevitable that on their annual visit in 1849 they should
insist that the newcomer, of whose arrival they were made
aware by his being brought out in his father’s arms, should
be ‘ WiUiam He was promptly dubbed the ‘ young
Prince of Orange ’, and an anti-popish acrostic on his
name was composed, in the last line of which he is bade
to ‘ Remember all thy Fathers bled to gain Hence
William he came to be christened, and decked out in
appropriate colours with a broad sash of orange and blue
he was brought out on the parsonage verandah on his later
birthdays to greet the procession which the other children
came to regard as arranged solely in his honour.

Without any written record, the early life may be
pictured of these eight children, the youngest of whom
was often referred to by his mother as ‘ Benjamin ’, and
by his father in babyhood, owing to his complexion and
black eyes, as ‘ Little burnt-holes-in-a-blanket The
earliest recollection of this particular boy, as he used to
recount years later, was of being nearly drowned the day
his younger sister was born, though as he was only two at
the time it may have been a figment of his imagination.
Both he and a calf had been tethered in the field adjoining
the parsonage. There was a pail of milk near by, which
on hands and knees he proceeded to investigate. At
a critical moment of unbalance he was toppled head first
into the pail by the calf, who shared his interest in the
contents. Another story he was wont to tell in after years
was of his once meeting a bear in a raspberry patch, but
this, too, may have been apocryphal.

It was an old-fashioned household in which regulations
were strict and promptitude was expected, beginning with
early morning prayers and ending at bed-time. The most
difficult problem concerned the children’s education. At
first a log school-house near by, where one of the neighbour-
ing family of Cavillers taught the rudiments of the ‘ three
R’s ’, was all that the vicinity afforded. Then a Mrs. HiU
started a school near Bradford some miles away, which the
elder boys attended, and finally a school was opened in
Bond Head by a Mr. Marling, to which in due course the
children trudged. But between the hours dedicated to

1 6 Bond Head and Dundas

school' and the many chores of farm and household there
was abundant time for such play as healthy youngsters
enjoy in the open, unhampered by organized sports —
coasting and skating and snowballing in the winter, fishing
and swimming in the pond by the saw-mill at the foot of
the hill, frolicking with Rover the Newfoundland dog, who
was trained to go to Bond Head for the mail ; playing
Indians in what remained of the great forest of hardwood
— white oak and maple, basswood, elm and beech, with
spruce and pine and beautiful red cedar which w’as split
and used for the miles of snake fences.

In spite of their hours passed on Mr. Marling’s benches,
doubtless most of the instruction of these children took
place at their mother’s knee, and with the Bible as the main
source of it. Theological books naturally predominated in
the parsonage, for Featherstone Osier, in the absence of
a provincial school of divinity, prepared a number of young
men, his brother included, for their ordination. There
was Hooker’s ‘ Ecclesiastical Polity ’, Butler’s ‘ Analogy ’,
Bishop Burnet’s ‘ Lives ’, Bishop Taylor’s and Isaac
Barrow’s works, the Parker Society publications (Reforma-
tion), Bunyan’s works, 1771, with the terrifying illustra-
tions to the ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress ’. There were indeed, as
one of the sons recalls, ‘ solid and indestructible blocks of
divinity of aU kinds ’. The writings of his brother Edward
Osier, the naturalist-doctor, were also well represented, as
told in this pencilled note found among Sir William’s
papers some seventy years later :

As a boy in a backwoods settlement in Uppei Canada, the English
post^ would bring letters from an Uncle Edward for whom'' we
cherished an amazing veneration ; for on the shelves in Father’s
little study were there not actually books written by him, and
poems, and mysterious big articles with drawings about shells, and
now and again did we not sing in church one of his hymns ? The
reputation of the family seemed to circle about this uncle whose
letters were always so welcome and so full of news of the old home
and so cheery. We boys could read the difference in our father’s
face when the post brought a letter from Uncle Sam, the black sheep
of the family.

Then there was, of course, Locke on the Understanding,
Josephus’s ‘ History of the Jews Hone’s ‘ Everyday Book ’

A Parsonage Library 17

with its fine wood-cuts ; and other volumes whose
backs and titles were familiar to children of the i85o’s=
A Macaulay, too, is remembered, and a 1721 Addison ;
‘ Sandford and Merton ’ ; ‘ The Fairchild Family ’ ; an early
copy of Tennyson ; and an occasional pious novel like
Hannah More’s ‘ Coelebs in Search of a Wife ’ was probably
sent out from England in the missionary boxes by ‘ the
S.P.G.’ or by friends in Cornwall. There came also stray
copies of Sharp’s London Magazine of Entertainment and
Instruction, the forerunner of Cornhill, and perhaps there
may have been odd numbers of ‘ Sketches by Boz ’, for one of
the children remembers his father ‘ roaring over Pickwick ’,
though this must have been exceptional, for he is described
by another of them as ‘ a reticent sort of a man, English to
the backbone, who seldom let himself go ’.

Then there was George Borrow, who as a missionary of
Cornish ancestry could not have written hurtful books ;
so ‘ The Bible in Spain ’ and even ‘ Lavengro ’ were not
taboo even on Sunday. Still, as Osier confessed long after,
though Sunday reading was remembered as a trial, yet
to see a person with a novel on the Sabbath gave him to
the end of his life a reflex shock reminiscent of his early
training. Copies of the Illustrated London News are also
remembered, partly for its pictures of the Crimean War,
but largely because this remote episode put up the price
of Canadian wheat to $2.00 a bushel. In consequence of
this and owing to the fact that the farm manager incon-
siderately died in the summer of 1855, Edmund and Britton
under their father’s direction had to run the partly cleared
loo-acre farm, get in fhe harvest, store the hay and dispose
of the turnips, potatoes, and wheat. One of them to-day,
sixty-nine years later, recalls vividly the feeling of the straw
scratching his bare legs, and the delight of a swim in the
pond two or three times a day.

On farms in the vicinity there were many families of
gentlefolk : the Williamses, the GaviUers, the Tyrwhitts, the
Perrums, the Caswells, and others, who became intimates,
and there were assuredly many picnics and parties for the
children. Mr. Perrum, their nearest neighbour, used to
dabble in chemistry and physics, and another avocation was

2923 I c

1 8 Bond Head and Dundas

the new art of amateur photography. To this, posterity is
indebted for a chance picture of some of these children
dressed in their homespuns, with a restless child, William,
at the end of the line. A few years later another incident
occurred at a picnic in the Gavillers’ woods. The children
were gathering firewood, and Willie, armed with a hatchet,
was engaged in chopping the faggots into lengths on a stump.
His sister ‘ Chattie ’ to tease him would put her small
hand on the stump, and finally he said he would count
three, and if she didn’t take it off she would lose a finger.
She lost it, fortunately only a tip, and brother Willie
disappeared to the hay-loft — ^from which he was extracted
some hours later — to escape the punishment to which he
was entitled, on the appeal of his still devoted sister and
playmate.

The elders, strict as they may have been with their
children, were not given to corporal punishment, and this
boy in particular, impulsive and full of mischief as he con-
tinually was, was so forgiving and affectionate that he
probably escaped many a deserved wigging. His elder
brother Frank relates that the onus for many of his own
escapades was apt to be voluntarily shouldered by Willie,
and that the younger brother once deservedly gave him
a black eye for some offence, but subsequently shielded him
before their parents and took the blame himself for the
quarrel. In a family of children essentially unselfish and
generous with their small possessions, Willie even as a boy
was quick to give the last penny of his scant pocket-money
to another who might be hard up.

In an address given in Glasgow fifty years later,^ Sii
William drew upon his early memories of these days for
this following comparison :

The most vivid recollections of my boyhood in Canada cluster
about the happy spring days when we went off to the bush to make
maple sugar — the bright sunny days, the delicious cold nights, the
camp-fires, the log cabins, and the fascinating work tapping the
trees, putting in the birch-bark spouts, arranging the troughs, and
then going from tree to tree, collecting in pails the clear sweet sap.

1 ‘ Pathological Institute of a General Hospital.’ Glasgow Medual
Josirnal, Nov. 1911, p. 15.

Childhood Incidents

19

One memoiy stands out above all others, the astonishment that so
little sugar was left after boiling down so great a cauldron af liquid.
And yet the sap was so abundant and so sweet. The workers of my
generation in the bush of science have collected a vaster quantity
of sap than ever before known ; much has already been boiled down,
and -it is for you of the younger generation while completing the job
to tap your own trees.

In the years since 1837 changes had taken place in
Tecumseth and its adjoining townships, as well as else-
where in Upper Canada, but the region about Lake Simcoe,
nevertheless, was lacking in much that was desirable for
the upbringing of a large family of children. Hence in
September of 1854 F^^therstone Osier felt impelled to
write Bishop Strachan of Toronto to request that he be
transferred, partly on the basis of indifferent health, which
was affected by the necessity of constant travel, but more
particularly on the grounds of his children’s education. The
elder boys had already been sent away to school in Barrie,
and were preparing to enter college, but there were six
younger children in need of more than Bond Head offered
and the purse of a frontier parson could afford.

Two years later the rectorship of Ancaster and Dundas
became vacant, and the Bishop on January i, 1857, ordered
his transfer to those parishes. But a transplantation is no
easy thing, and they found it a hard wrench to leave Bond
Head, despite its shortcomings, as is evident from this
passage in Canon Osier’s diary :

It was one of the hardest trials of my life to leave the place where
I had lived happily nineteen and a half years, and the people with
whom I had lived without a jar or discord during the whole period,
but I felt that the Church would not suffer by my leaving it. In
the neighbouring townships many churches had been built, and in
Tecumseth and West Gwillimbury, my specially licensed charge,
where there had been neither church, parsonage, nor glebe, there
were now six churches, two parsonages, and two glebes ; the one in
Tecumseth being especially valuable, consisting of 200 acres. I had
160 acres cleared.

So it came about that the Bond Head farm was sold and
the family was moved to a more self-contained community
where conditions of life were far less primitive and arduous.
For Dundas at the time, situated most picturesquely at the

20 Bond Head and Dundas ^857-64

very western tip of Lake Ontario, lialf-way between Toronto
and Niagara, promised, owing to its favourable position, to
become the metropolis of the new province.

Two of the boys had already gone to a boarding-school
in Dundas, and fortune favoured the transfer of the remain-
ing family in a curious way, for having journeyed safely hy
the recently opened Northern Railway from Bradford to
Toronto and having made arrangements to go from there,
by rail the following day to Dundas, the boy Willie, as is
related, came down unexpectedly with the croup, and the
second stage of the journey was deferred. The train the}-
were to have taken on the Great Western Railway became
derailed as it was approaching Hamilton, and the coaches
plunged through the viaduct into the canal forty feet
below, vdth great loss of life — the Desjardin catastrophe of
March 12, 1857.

Dundas

Here in the prosperous and fertile river-valley at the
head of the lake there began an entirely new life. With
Dundas in the centre of his parish, rwth good roads making
travel comparatively easy, with accessible schools for the
children, and cultivated people as neighbours. Canon Osier
spent his next twenty- five years. A temporary residence in
the centre of the town situated in the valley was soon
given up and a permanent move of the rectory was made
to the southern heights overlooking the valley towards its
still higher northern escarpment called the Mountain —
a panorama of rare beauty. There are indeed few more
picturesque spots on the Great Lakes, and in a comfortable
home in these charming surroundings with an intimate
group of ideal neighbours and friends the years passed
happily by for parents and children.

There was an Episcopal boarding-school for girls in
Dundas at the time, and one of the pupils, then fourteen,
vividly recalls even at this day Canon Osier and his wife,
to whom the tradition still clung that she was of Indian
ancestry :

I can see the little Episcopal Church with the sunshine filtering
through the coloured windows. One of our teachers was organist,

21

Aet. 7-14 ‘ Tecumseth Cabbages ’

two others sang in the choir and we were all required to attend
services, Lenten too, and often Matins, and early Communion —
we were really part of the church. The Rector as I remember him
was a good-looking, rather short ‘ roly-poly ’ man with blue eyes,
bushy whiskers and heavy eyebrows, intoning the service and rows
and rows of girls repeating at intervals, ‘ Lord, have mercy upon us,
and incline our hearts to keep this law.’ He was a fine character,
though quite unlike his brilliant sons, but we all loved him though
we called him in private ‘ Sneezer ’ (this is of couise entre nous).
Then those Saturday, Easter, and Christmas parties ! The romantic
tales we wove aiound Mrs. Osier ! Of course in our minds she was
directly descended from Pocahontas, and a beautiful chief wanted
to marry her but her father chose the Englishman ! How disappointed
we would have been had we known the truth.

There was every prospect that Dundas, then a town of
some 3,000 souls, possessing a daily newspaper ! and seven
churches !! was destined to become the chief city at the
western end of the lake. The great highway. Governor’s
Road or Dundas Street, passed through it to the west ; it
had a splendid water power, and the Desjardin Canal, cut
through the marshes for a distance of five miles, connected it
with the ideal land-locked harbour made by Burlington Bay.
All this bid fair at the time to ensure its future growth
and prosperity. One of the most attractive features of the
lower valley was the huge marsh, long called ‘ Coote’s
Paradise ’, after an early sportsman of Governor Simeoe’s
time, who spent much of his leisure in shooting game
there ; and in the course of years, as will be seen, this
same marsh became the hunting-ground for zoological
specimens by a young naturalist and his preceptor.

The younger boys, promptly dubbed by their new play-
mates ‘ Tecumseth cabbages ’, in view of their rural place
of origin, were sent to the local grammar-school, conducted
first by a classical scholar, a Mr. John King of Trinity
College, Dublin, who had come out to. Canada in i854>
and subsequently by another Irishman, a Mr. J. J. Flynn,
as principal. This grammar-school occupied quarters up-
stairs in a building which also housed a common-school on
the ground floor, a situation almost certain to lead to
trouble, particularly as the head master of the common-
school was a despot who disliked boys as a class, but

22 Bond Head and Dundas June i86+

par-ticularly grammar-school boys. Doubtless Mr. Flynn
himself was the victim of many pranks on the part of his
own irrepressible pupils, than whom there was probably none
more notorious than a rollicldng boy named Willie Osier,
who though adored by all was particularly ingenious- in
evolving and perpetrating practical jokes of an elaborate
and unusual sort, in which as a rule he took the leadership.

Which one of many escapades led to his final dismissal
makes little difference — whether it was the flock of geese
found one morning locked in the room of the common-
school, or the discovery on a Monday morning of a school
without furniture, the desks and benches all having been
unscrewed from the floor and laboriously hoisted up
through a trap-door into the garret the Saturday after-
noon before ; or whether it was some disparaging "remarks
concerning the head master of the common-school shouted
through a keyhole.^ At all events, expelled he was, with
his four accomplices.

His sister recalls meeting him on the way home that
eventful^ day. He was ri^ng bareback on the Canon’s
horse, picked up at the shop of his friend and confidant,
Pat O’Connor the blacksmith, on whom he had called to
impart the news ; waving his hand he shouted, gleefully,

‘ Chattie, I’ve got the sack ! ’

^ Aa account of tke episode with the altercation which followed it may
be found in the local news-sheet, 7 he Banner, June a, 1864, et seq.

CHAPTER II

1864-7

BOARDING-SCHOOL DAYS

Barrie

Thus Willie Osier came to be sent away the next autumn
to a boarding-school, and following the footsteps of his
brothers was entered in the grammar-school at Barrie, a
town on the western arm of Lake Simcoe, half-way between
his old home at Bond Head and Penetanguishene. The
Rev. W. F. Checkley, a famous schoolmaster of the day
and a friend of the boys’ father, was principal, and under
him many sons of the early settlers in Upper Canada
spent their first year away from home, though by this
particular time the school’s reputation had somewhat
waned and its numbers dwindled. Of the mischievous boy
who had come from Dundas there is little but hearsay
record, for the school no longer exists, and the old brick
building after many vicissitudes has been demolished. One
may gather from his mother’s weekly chronicle of home
news that his wants were few, and it is hoped that he
secured some slippery ‘ elem ’ in Barrie, and that brother
Frank, who had been rusticated, got his skates by Christmas :

From his mother to W, 0 . Dundas. October [1864].

My dear Willie, — I can excuse you if you begin to think of yourself
in a small degree slighted, for I ought to have written last week but
could not manage it and we were for some days expecting a letter
from you before it came. I am sorry to find you had such a bad
cold but hope it will not wind up with another attack of Inter-
mittent ; we too all of us have or have had colds indeed who has
not during this changeable weather. Charlotte has written you
all the news of the day and the Pater told you how well the Ancas-
trians did at their Bazaar — 1400 was more than any of us expected
to make. ... I bought a winter necktie for you which I will try to
enclose in this letter but both Papa and I think it will be useless
to send up a box, as apples are scarcely to be had and Frank’s expedi-
tion for nuts the other day was only productive of one quart so if
Papa sends you up a dollar it must do instead and I dare say you
could get a tooth brush and a packet of slippery Elm (not Elem)

24 Boarding-School Days 1864-65

bark at Barrie nor can we find your ‘ Horace ’ in the study to send
up, I am glad your clothes suit. Frank went down by Boat last
week to Toronto and got a suit of clothes atW^alkers and Felt hat ;
they make him look quite the young man ; nothing yet has turned
up for him to do, but all are looking out for him. . . . Papa is going
to take this down town to get a dollar note and a stamp to enclose,
if we can find the ‘ Horace ’ we will send it up by post next week.
Give my kind regards to Mrs. Checkley and love to h'Irs. Steuart
when you see her and with my best love to you hoping that you are
on terms of love and friendship with your books I am ever

Your affectionate Mother
Ellen Osler.

Frank left his skates at Barrie. Mind you take care of them to
bring home at Christmas.

The school was divided into day-pupils and boarders, the
latter living with Mr. Checkley, who does not seem to have
left any deep and lasting impression, upon one of them at
least. But no matter how slack his observance of regula-
tions, a boy who is afEectionate, chivalrous, and generous,
who has no difficulties with scholarship and at the same
time excels in sports — such a boy becomes a leader wherever
he may be put to school, and makes fast friends. Indeed,
one of Osier’s outstanding characteristics was his tenacity
for friendships, which once made were never forgotten, and
with his particular friends of this early school period he
kept up a running correspondence during his subsequent
migratory life and even till his last days, never failing to
send messages of greeting on holidays and birthdays, nor
to hold out a helping hand when they or their families
were in trouble or want.

The mere transfer from one institution to another does
not suffice to subdue the effervescent spirits of a fun-
loving boy, and there were three youngsters among the
fourteen or more in the school who earned the appellation
of ‘ Barrie’s Bad Boys ’ — Ned Milburn, Charlie Locke, and
Willie Osier — and the last-mentioned, in his later years,
used to recount with glee to his special children-friends the
pranks of these Barrie days. One of them writes :

Sir William used to tell me stories of bis boyhood as I sat on the
floor at his knees by the library fire, but I am afraid .they were all
either lacking in details of time or place. ... I was in the garden with

Act. i5-i 6 ‘Barrie’s Bad Boys’ 25

him one day and dared him to throw a stone and hit somethihg that
was a long way off, and he hit it true with the first stone., and told
me that on his way to school one day with three other small boys
Ned Miiburn dared him to hit a pig with a stone. The pig was
a long way off, but with the first stone he hit it directly behind the
ear and to his chagrin killed it instantly. He would always laugh
till the tears came into his eyes at the thought of how ^ that old
pig looked as he rolled over on his back with his four legs stiff in the
air,’ and of how the farmer came out and took him by the scruff of
his neck straight home ; and his father had to pay eight dollars
for the pig. . . . During those last sad years I never saw him laugh
so heartily or look so happy as when he forgot the present and lived
again his old pianks.

Mr. Miiburn, who of these three boys alone survives,
writes as follows of those days, passing over in a few words,
as taken for granted, that owing to his remarkably retentive
memory and ezceptional powers of concentration, ^ Osier
easily ranked first in the whole school ^ ; also, that even
when at Barrie he was notably proficient in that greatest of
books, the Bible

. . . The spirit of fun was •well marked in him — real fun that hurt
nobody but sometimes caused a little annoyance to the victims of
the joke. The fact is we were often blamed for the misdoings of
ill-conditioned boys belonging to the town, even though we could
prove a perfectly good alibi. At times a zeal for study would seize
us, especially when exams were imminent, and as our study-hours
ended at 9 30 at which time all lamps were taken away, we would
jump out of our dormitory window some six feet above the ground
and study our Xenophon, Virgil or Caesar by the light of the full
moon, then we would go down to the Bay distant a little over
100 yards and disport ourselves an hour or two in the cool water. . . .

Not far from the school was a large cottage, the residence of
Sheriff Smith, with a fine garden in which the gardener took great
pride. In it was a fine melon-patch. We determined to have
a melon, so taking advantage of the absence of the household we
secured each a melon, but just as we came to the road, up came the
gardener. As the Sheriff insisted on our punishment the result was
we were gated for a week and had to write out the text of Virgil,
Bk. I. 0 . said little, but watching his chance he got on the roof
and put a board over the chimney — soon the excitement began.
The Barrie Hook and Ladder Co. with what we called ^ Cataract
No. D came tearing along — only to find no fire — only smoke. This
was our reprisal, so to speak. . . .

One of the last tricks, indeed the last, I think, that we played,

26

Boarding-School Days 1865-66

was on* an American who had advertised for a wife. In our Toronto
papers O: noticed the advertisement and suggested the following
plan — to answer the advertisement describing ourselves as a brunette
and a blonde respectively — so that he could make choice according
to his fancy. We had some tiouble in fitting ourselves out with
girls’ clothes, but with my sister’s help we developed into pretty fail
specimens of the genus girl.

In due time the farmer arrived at the Grand Trank Station wheie
we had agreed to meet him, for the station we knew was badly
lighted, which w^ould be of advantage to us. All went well — ^\e
resisted his request for another meeting by daylight and asked him
to make his choice then and there. He did so, and as he rather liked
blondes his choice feU on me. I wonder at it, for O. made a beautiful
girl with his clear-cut featuies and olive complexion. We never
knew what became of the farmer — he left us, promising to return
in a month, as this would give him time to fix up his house. I hope
he got a blonde.

As mentioned above, Osier possessed a remarkably supple
body which enabled him to excel in all youthful sports ;
and the elastic swinging step of a boy characterized him to
his last days. He at one time won a school prize for kicking
the football, and after leaving school and when in college
played in matches with the Hamilton cricket team during
his summer vacations. Mr. Milburn continues :

We were all very fond of athletics and were big boys for our age.
. . . Nothing cotild tire us. We were all bone with steel bands foi
muscles. On one occasion we three essayed to swim across Kempen-
felt Bay, there (at Barrie) I fancy about a mile-and-a-half wide.
Accompanied by a boat we started on the trip. I managed to cover
about a mile when my fingers began to cramp and I climbed into
the boat. O. and Locke kept on and accomplished the feat, a very
difficult one due to the many cold springs in the Bay. He was also
good at cricket. On one occasion I saw him throw a cricket-ball
1 15 yards, a throw never beaten I think, at least by an am.iteur.

Weston

The reputation of the Barrie school being at this time
on the wane, this, together with its distance from Dundas,
must have influenced the boy’s parents in favour of a
change. A circular had been received by them describing
a new school recently opened at Weston, a town on the
Humber, a few miles west of Toronto, and a paragraph
in the circular stated that senior boys would go into the

Act. i6 ‘ Father ’ Johnson 27

drawing-room in the evening and be taught music, dancing,
and painting. If this was the lure, it seems to have been
a vain one, for in the capacity to learn such arts William
Osier was by nature deficient ; but to the school he was
sent, and here something not advertised, but far more
important than these parlour accomplishments, was found
— namely, a real master, ‘ who knew nature and how to
get boys interested in it

The Rev. William Arthur Johnson was born in 1816, in
Bombay. His father, then Quartermaster-General to the
Bombay forces, was an engineer officer, who not only had
a distinguished military career in India but had served
earlier as aide-de-camp to Arthur Wellesley (first Duke of
Wellington) from whom this his second son received the
name Arthur. On retiring with the rank of Colonel he
returned to England and lived at Down House, where later
Darwin lived and died ; and he became a friend of Turner
and of Landseer, and was ‘ no mean artist himself’.

The son William Arthur for whom Wellington had stood
as godfather had been sent to the military school at Addis-
combe,^ and it is said was later offered a commission by the
Duke. But, disliking the army, he abandoned that career and
■with the Jukes family migrated to Upper Canada in 1831,
where his father soon followed him, to take up one of the
land grants for retired officers near Port Maitland. Johnson
subsequently entered the Church, and became curate under
Archdeacon Bethune (subsequently Bishop of Toronto)
then at Cobourg. From the first he was apparently in-
fluenced by the Oxford Tractarians, and had he been in
England instead of Canada in 1851, the year he was
ordained, he might have joined forces with Newman. Some
of his ‘ low church ’ parishioners both at Cobourg and
at his subsequent parish of St. Paul’s, Yorkville, made
trouble for him on these grounds. Bishop Strachan
exonerated but did not support him, and he was finally
inducted as the rector at St. Philip’s, Etobicoke, a remote
hamlet across the river from Weston.

^ His cider brother had beea there before him ; had gone into the army ;
seen service in Arabia ; been advanced to Captain, and was drowned at
Surat m Ms twenty-seventh year.

28 Boarding-School Days jan. 1866

In this parish he became much beloved, though he
remained' to the end more or less of a thorn in the flesh to
his bishop on account of his ritualistic proclivities, which
he defended both in pulpit and press. Having a family of
three boys of his own to educate and there being no dis-
tinctly church school in Toronto at the time, he determined
to start one himself. Accordingly, at his own expense and
on his own responsibility, a school known as ‘ Weston ’ was
opened in a small building on the west bank of the Humber,
overlooking the ruins of an old mill, traces of which still
stand in the lowlands of the picturesque river valley.

The project thrived, and in 1864 Johnson proposed to
the governing body of Trinity University that the school
come under their supervision, that it be called the Trinity
College School, and serve to prepare boys for Trinity
University. For himself he proposed that as a master,
he should teach French, drawing, and water-colour paint-
ing, without remuneration, and, what is moie, would
make himself responsible for the expenses of the establish-
ment, provided he might use the name of Trinity College
in the circular of announcement, to which reference has
just been made.

There were many pourparlers, and it may be assumed
that Bishop Strachan had some misgivings regarding the
unruly priest he had been disposed to discipline. However,
the corporation on the 8th November 1864 sanctioned the
arrangement, and the school formally opened the next May
with about a dozen boys, a greater number than had been
expected or could well be cared for. As there was no
room for them available in the village, the pupils, soon
twenty-five in number, were somehow accommodated in
the parsonage, the half-basement of which was fitted out
with rude desks, a large upper room being converted into
a dormitory. In this school Willie Osier was entered on
January 18, 1866. ‘ I can see him now ’, writes one of his
mates, ‘ soon after he arrived at the rector}' — with a red
pocket-handkerchief round his neck and a sling in his hand
taking a survey of any chance birds in the garden.’ This
occupation must have been more to his liking than practis-
ing scales indoors, for his mother writes at the expiration

Aet. 1 6 The Weston School 29

of a few weeks : ‘ Papa I dare say will be at Weston next
week and then will give you the V for the quarters music
if it is stiU your mind to learn.’ But it was not to be
through his advertised courses that Johnson came to mould
aijd influence the thoughts and subsequent career of his
young pupil, in whose attitude towards life a great change
took place in the short space of the next eighteen months.
But years are longer at seventeen than later in life, and
fortunate the schoolboy who at this impressionable age
makes contact with such a guide, philosopher, and friend
as the Rev. W. A. Johnson proved to be. It was an associa-
tion never forgotten, and to his indebtedness the pupil in
after years made repeated reference in his writings and
addresses.

‘Father’ Johnson,^ though the founder and Warden of
the school, and its real influence among the boys, was not
the Head Master. This position, fiUed by the Corporation
of Trinity, was occupied by a tall, austere young man with
‘ long black whiskers and a very decided mouth ’, a classical
scholar and recent graduate of Trinity College who had
learned during a subsequent sojourn in England, it is said,
how a good Church School should be conducted on the
long- established traditions of the great English Public
Schools. Being a martinet and addicted to the birch,
believing that the way to reach a boy was through his hide,
the Head Master was as unpopular as the Warden was
otherwise. He lived in rooms built off the parsonage, and
from them could see the windows of the schoolroom in the
half-basement, which put the boys to the great disadvantage
of never knowing when his eye was on them. The con-
sequences of any misbehaviour has been so vividly recalled
in an article written by one of the boys ^ that one feels he
may have had experience with ‘ caning which was one of
the strong points of the school ’ :

The canes, too, were peculiar. They were made of beautifully
polished, round strips of what was known as second-growth Walpole

^ The appellation ‘Father’ Johnson, as his friends loved to address
him, was one which in those days a Protestant might have regarded as a
term of reproach — a reproach in which Johnson, however, would have gloried.

® Arthur Jukes Johnson. ‘Trinity College School Record, 1915, p. 57.

30 Boarding-School Days April 1866

hickory.' They were practically unbreakable, and would bend like
a bit of India rubber, warranted to be felt over every spot they
touched. There was a decided advantage to the culprit in his being
sent for the cane : in the first place it gave the master, supposing
that he had been somewhat ruffled, time to get thorough command
of himself, and it also gave the boy an opportunity of preparing for
the ordeal. Having to go through a long passage outside the house
before he reached the Head Master’s room, opportunities might
occur to his mind of so arranging matters that the caning was not
so hard to bear. . . .

With the object, it may be, of escaping from such tyranny
Osler and one of his mates early in his Weston career con-
trived an ingenious and effective method of enjoying a
sojourn at home, by deliberately exposing themselves to a
boy who was in quarantine with chicken-pox — a fact now
made public for the first time, as the one surviving member
of the conspiracy no longer feels bound by their oath of
secrecy.

The school gradually increased its nimibcrs until it was
no longer possible even for an elastic parsonage to encompass
it all. Hence a new building had been secured some little
distance away, for classrooms and dormitory, where the
Head Master reigned supreme. He had engaged a house-
keeper, an old woman, and her buxom daughter, both of
whom came to be heartily disliked, and thereby hangs a tale,
for to be disliked in a boys’ school is to invite molestation.
The story can be found in the county court records of the
Toronto Globe for April 8-13, 1866, under the caption,
‘ School Roza at Weston. Pufils Turned Outlazos. They
Fumigate the Matron with Sulphur.’ A mild rendering of
the episode has been printed elsewhere ^ by the Warden’s
eldest son, one of the culprits, but a somewhat more lively
version comes from the little girl to whom stories of his
boyhood used to be told by Sir William before the library
fire in Oxford. In this rendering the assault was in revenge
for a specified offence, the despised female the day before
having upset a pail of slops on the stairs, which soused one
of the boys. Hence, on the day in question, the coast
being clear and at Osier’s instigation, they barricaded ' the
old girl ’ in her sitting-room and made a paste of molasses,
^ Tnnity College School Record, Jubilee Number, 1915, xvii, 63.

Aet. i6 Fumigating the Matron 3 r

mustard, and pepper, which they put on the schoolroom
stove, so that the fumes rose to her room through the
stovepipe hole. The prisoner stuffed the hole with some
clothes, which the boys pushed back with pointers. Being
resourceful and to avoid suffocation, she sat on the register
and screamed for help, while the boys poked at her from
below as they had done to the clothes. Ultimately she was
rescued by the Head Master, and the boys, as can be
imagined, duly experienced the effects of the Walpole
hickory strips. But this did not satisfy the Matron, who
demanded their arrest for assault and battery. Unable to
get a warrant issued in Weston, she finally secured one in
Toronto, so that the nine boys, including the Warden’s
two sons, passed a few days in the Toronto jail, and were
defended by the young Osier’s elder brother, Featherston,
before the magistrate in the county council-chamber, with
the result of a reprimand and payment of a dollar and costs.
At all events, they had effectually ‘ smoked the old girl
out ’, for she refused to stay longer at the school. ‘ It was
an unfortunate affair wrote his mother on April 19th,

‘ that of all you boys being brought into public notice in
such a disreputable manner, and although I do not think
it was meant to be more than a mere schoolboy prank,
such things often teU against a person long after, and I hear
many say they think it wUl injure the reputation of the
school.’ With which mild reprimand his ‘ ever loving
Mother ’ ended by enclosing two dollars and a postage
stamp.

It was a humble setting at Weston, a square, two-storied,
plastered house which served as parsonage as well as
school, in which Johnson, his wife, and three children
lived, together with as many boys as could be crowded in ;
and their names to-day can be seen scratched with some
one’s diamond on the low windows. In addition to the
Warden’s family was the Head Master, and he in turn had
an assistant, and a Mr. Sefton came out for the week-ends
and gave music lessons. There was also a Mr. Carter, who,
when not engaged in the classics, taught cricket and foot-
ball ; and a ‘ Captain ’ Goodwin, an old Waterloo veteran
and great favourite with the boys, not only drilled them

ms

32 Boarding-School Days

every Saturday afternoon, but taught them the manly art
of self-defence with fist and cudgel. There was a playground
near by, and also the Warden’s private chapel, while the
woods on one side and the little town on the other stretched
along the bluflE overlooking the river valley. In this setting
the effort was being made by the Head Master to reproduce
on a small scale something of Eton, Harrow, or Rugby, by
transplanting to new soil the traditions of these and similar
foundations as little modified as possible, to make them fit
in vsdth or to neutralize the democratic ideas which were
beginning to take hold of the country. Though ‘ fagging ’
had not been introduced, the school discipline was main-
tained by the ‘ prefect ’ system, wherebj' the boys were
placed on their honour and practically governed them-
selves under the supervision of four prefects chosen from
their own number. The prefects, of whom 0^1er was soon
made head, held their positions as long as tliey could retain
the boys’ confidence, and there were ways of superseding
a prefect if he showed himself unworthy of his position.
They exercised large authority in the school, and dealt
with all such petty incidents as squabbling, Billingsgate
exchanges, bullying, and so on — occurrencc.s tvhich may
make the life of an unprotected small boy in a school
utterly wretched. As one of Osier’s mates recalls :

The process was simple. A sharp voice would ring out : ‘ Stop
that, you muckers.’ If that wasn’t stopped — ‘ Well, we must settle
this business at once.’ If the lads were evenly matched, well and
good ; if not, the heavyweight must submit to some handic.ap, or
the lightweight might call upon his particular pal and the thing
would be fought out — ‘ Queensbeiry rules — shake hands — now
to it.’ The prefect would see fair play and when in his opinion
enough punishment had been given the fray must ce.ise, the warriors
shake hands and as a rule be fast friends — for a time at least. Some-
times two rooms of boys would have to settle their difference in this
way, but the general engagements of this kind were frowned upon
by the Head Master.

The boys were garbed in a sort of Eton attire, and were
expected to appear in public wearing top-hats. This must
have been particularly tantalizing for the town boys of this
small country village ; and to wear a top-hat certainly puts
one at a great disadvantage in a snowball battle. Christian

Aet. 1 6

The School Prefect

33

names, of course, were ignored and nicknames discouraged.
Jones was ‘ Jones ’ in classroom, on cricket-field, or' at roll-
call, and this last was a duty which devolved upon the
prefect, who had to recite from memory the list of names
at fixed hours, even during play-time, to ascertain whether
any boy was out of bounds without leave of absence. As
one of the surviving prefects of Osier’s day recalls, this was
easy enough if there was only one Jones, but otherwise the
senior Jones would be ‘ Jones max,’ ; and after fifty-five
years he recalls like an old tune the roster of his time :

‘ Anderson max., Anderson major, Anderson minor. Beck,
Boulton, etc., etc.’

But as a man is more important than his workshop, so
the Warden was more important than his school, and it is
to him that this story must return. For the Rev. W, A.
Johnson’s conception of education did not lie in the greatest
number of facts which could be drilled into his boys, but in
the ideas which centrifugally would radiate from them under
varied stimuli not necessarily confined to the schoolroom.
He must have been the despair of his Head Master. He
was an artist, among other things, and sketched well ; he
was a wood-carver, and the products of his chisel, some of
which still adorn the parish church at Weston, can perhaps
be best seen on the carved altar table of St. Matthew’s,
Toronto. He was a nature-lover, not in the casual sense
of admiring her beauties from afar, but in the sense of the
scientist who thinks nature even more beautiful and thrilling
if seen close at hand under the microscope.^ With all this
he was an ardent high-churchman, given to genuflexions,
to prayer and meditation in his private chapel adjoining
the school,^ and was such a punctilious observer of high-
church ritual that it kept him in more or less hot water.
The head prefect of these Weston days, nearly fifty years
later in an address ^ dealing with science in the public
schools, expressed himself as follows :

As a boy I had the common experience of fifty years ago — teachers
whose sole object was to spoonfeed classes, not with the classics but

^ This chapel (St John’s), removed from its former site beside the old
rectory, now stands encased in brick on the north side of Main Street, Weston,

^ ^ he School Worlds London, 1916, pp, 41-4.

2923.1 D

34 Boarding-School Days ]Ma7i866

with syntax and prosody, forcing our empty wits, as hlilton says,
to compose ^ Theams, Verses and Orations wrung from pool-
striplings like blood from the nose, with the result that we loathed
Xenophon and his ten thousand, Homer was an abomination, while
Livy and Cicero were names and tasks. Ten years with really able
Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford teachers left me with no moie
real knowledge of Greek and Latin than of Chinese, and without
the free use of the languages as keys to great literatures. Imagine
the delight of a boy of an inquisitive nature to meet a man who
cared nothing about words, but who knew about things — who
knew the stars in their courses and could tell us their names,
who delighted in the woods in springtime, and told us about the
frog-spawn and the caddis worms, and who read us in the evenings
Gilbert White and Kingsley’s ‘ Glaucus who showed us with the
microscope the marvels in a drop of dirty pond water, and who on
Saturday excursions up the river could talk of the Trilobites and the
Orthoceratites and explain the foimation of the earth’s crust. No
more dry husks for me after such a diet, and early in my college
life I kicked over the traces and exchanged the classics vvith ‘ divvers ’
as represented by Pearson, Browne and Hooker, for Hunter, Lyell
and Huxley. From the study of nature to the study of man was
an easy step. My experience was that of thousands, yet, as I lemem-
ber, we were athirst for good literature. What a delight it would
have been to have had Chapman’s ^ Odyssey ’ read to us, oi Plato’s
‘ Phaedo ’ on a Sunday evening, or the ^ Vera Historia What
a tragedy to climb Parnassus in a fog ! How I have cuised the
memory of Protagoras since finding that he introduced grammar
into the curriculum, and forged the fetters which chained generations
of schoolboys m the cold formalism of words. How different now
that Montaigne and Milton and Locke and Petty have come into
their own, and are recognized as men of sense m the matter of
training youth.

So the interests of these days come to a focus in W. A.
Johnson and his microscope in so far as they relate to a boy
who was expected to follow his father’s footsteps and enter
the ministry. Two months after enteiing the school he
had been prepared by the Warden for confirmation at
St. Philip’s ; and that he had strong leanings towards the
Church is apparent from one of his mother’s letteis wiitten
towards the end of the spring term :

From his mother to JF. 0 . Dundas, May 30th, 1866.

My dear Willie, — . . . Papa had your letter a day or two ago and
will probably write to you soon and as well to Mr. Badgely about

Aet. 1 6

An all-round Athlete

35

your remaining another year at school. And now my dear boy let
me have a little serious chat with you about entering the' Church
which you say you have made up your mind to do. My first impulse
was to thank God that he had heard my prayer and inclined one of
my six boys to make choice of that as his path in life. It is a matter
not to be decided on hastily any more than is any other profession —
take your time for consideration and above all search your heart
for the motives inducing your decision, for remember that God
always judges of us by our motives while man can only judge of our
actions. ... I send you a volume of good advice which was given many
years ago by a good man to his son at Shrewsbury School it is good
for boys in all ages and at all schools read it carefully and follow it
fully and in the Book of Proverbs which the wisest of fathers wrote
for the benefit of his son and which is meant for you as well as for
him you will find far better advice than I can give. May God
incline your heart to love and serve Him through His beloved Son
is the prayer of your loving Mother,

Ellen Osler.

[PS.] I see your name flourishing in the Games of Monday, it
was a bad day, nevertheless I hope you all enjoyed the fun.

[PPS.] My dear Willie, — I must just scribble another line to tell
you how proud we all were to see ‘ Osier 1st ’ so many times in the
paper to-day and I was so soiry to see the rain yesterday, but it
does not seem to have made much difference ; we hope to have
a long account of the day’s proceedings from you soon ; the notice
in the Leader was very short. You will have a long letter from me
as soon as I can find time for such a proceeding. Bye-bye.

His name indeed ^ flourished for according to the
Toronto Leader he came out number one in the majority
of the athletic contests which had been staged for the
preceding Monday — the hurdle race, the 200- and 400-yard
flat races ; the 1 00-yard hop race, the mile steeplechase,
and throwing the cricket ball, though there seems, from
the following recollection of one of his schoolmates, some
doubt about its having been a record throw :

Physically Osier was rather undersized but extremely wiry and
well propoitioned, a fine all-round athlete, without being a champion
in any particular line. I believe though, he did break the record
for throwing the cricket ball at one of our term-end sports. Un-
fortunately, however, the Campus (if we may use a word I don’t
like, which our college athletes have to-day taken over from the
Yankee vocabulary) proved too restricted for his prowess, and the
ball hit the high fence near the top. Such a throw was never dreamed
of. But Professor Jones, of Trinity, possibly not an unprejudiced

1866

36 Boarding-School Days

referee, came to the rescue, and by the aid of most compelling
mathematical calculations— no doubt they were absolutely accurate
as became the dictum of an exact science — demonstrated to our
entire satisfaction that if the retched fence had not been in the
way the ball would have hit the sod at a distance that neither Rugby
nor Eton had ever achieved Anyhow, it is not on record that our
English schools yielded their claim to the championship on the
strength of Professor Jones’s verdict.

But the excursions on week-ends in the beautiful valley
through which the Humber flows, and the expeditions to
more distant places during vacation time in company with
the nineteenth-century edition of. the Sage of Selborne,
who had a lilce taste for observing and for recording natural
phenomena, served to deflect him from his drift tow^ards
the Church. One of his boyhood companions, the Rev.
Arthur Jarvis of Toionto, in some reminiscences of their
school-days at Weston, says :

It was our greatest treat when Old Johnson ’ could be led to
take a squad out for a field day, hunting fossils, and he did not need
much persuasion. I can still see the Warden uielding an old pro-
spector’s pick, and Osier the most eager boy of the lot to secure
a perfect orthoceratite or whatever Lower Siluiian relic the soft
stone about Weston might yield. Some of us were keen to retiieve
a few good sections of orthoceras to be diligently polished and
converted into prodigious sleeve-links at ^ Kent’s store ’ in Yonge
Street.

Osier, however, was the scientist of the expedition. To him W’as
entrusted the delicate work of grinding dowm and mounting specimens
for microscope slides. Sometimes he might graciously, after the
manner of Tom Sawyer, delegate some of this piotracted mechanical
grinding on the Water-of~Ayre stone to our less skilled hands — it
wasn’t every day that a boy had a chance to help in the construction
of valuable scientific exhibits ! Neveitheless experts pronounced
them exceptionally fine— after Osier had put the finishing touches,

^W. A. Johnson was an omnivorous naturalist, ranging
widely with no attempt at specialization. Everything
interested him, the structure of the hair of different
animals from the caribou to the flying squirrel, the structure
and growth of wood, the study of fossils and minerals, the
finer anatomy of moths and butterflies and insects of every
kind, some of which he unblushingly transferred from his
own person or bed to the stage of the microscope ; seeds

Act. 1 6 Johnson the Naturalist 37

and shells, ferns and mosses, bones and teeth of vertebrates
from those of a thirty-pound ^ Masquenonge caught by
his son-in-law, to the molar of an old cow iUled on the
railway track. He was an amateur, it is true, and dabbled
in many fields, but the flame nevertheless burned brightly,
and he knew how to transmit it to others. His field note-
book with the tabulation of his microscopic slides all care-
fully enumerated and indexed, tells the story better than
words, and it is a pity that it cannot be quoted in full,
particularly during the year when the young Osier begins
to appear on its pages. He took the Microscopical Journal^
and consulted other books of reference, as can be seen by
some of these illustrative entries :

§ 493. 16/1/67. Aspiiiotus conchiformiSf or ‘ oyster shell baik

louse For a description of this little destructive thing see
Harris pg, 254 Sc Practical Entomologist at pg. 31 of Vol. ii,
where there is a good drawing Sc description.

§ 733. i2/xii/67. Fossil wood. On the 8th N0V./67, Mr. W.

Grubb gave me a roughly ground seal wh. he said was fossil
wood, an oak? tree from Craigleigh Quarry nr. Edinburgh,
Scotland, at about lOO ft. below the surface : he got the bit of
stone himself. See pg. 40, and pg. 375, LyelPs Elementary
Geology, 6th edition, 1837.

§ 749. 7/i/68. Larva (aquatic) Palpicornes Hydrophtlus^ with

curious head, tripartite shovel on head. Taken in July, 67, in
W. Holley’s pond on G. T. Railway Weston. See Animal
Kingdom, by I. R. Jones, p. 125.

§ 1430. i5/ii/7i. Leg bone of a Crane, Hern or Heron shot

Sept. 28, 1867. Note these two are ground on glass with puraic[e]
stone wetted and put up with Balsam. See Qua^y Journal
microscopical science.

§ 1488. i5/i/73* Insects in a book — In the first page of Carpenter’s
Comparative Physiology. This intensely cold weather seems
a strange time for them to be about. Unknown to me at this
date, except by sight. This stellate form, wh is often so
plentiful in watery collections, is from the seeds of the Mullein
collected about Oct. ist.

Accordingly, though Johnson’s library of five or six
hundred volumes was chiefly ecclesiastical, the boys in the
parsonage had access to Lyell and Dana, to Gray, Harris,
Hogg, and Carpenter, which in the hands of the Warden
probably interested them more than did the Princtpia

3 8 Boarding-School Days 1866

Latina, Arnold, Anthon, and 1 odhunter in the hands of
the Head Master, whose tasks consisted largely in the
committing to memory of countless lines of Homer and
Virgil, read with the aid of Schrevelius’ lexicon and Ross's
grammar, in which the definitions were in Greek and Latin
respectively. How Osier’s powers of concentration, that
stood him in such good stead in later ycais, came to be so
highly developed is indicated by this iccollection of one of
his schoolmates :

Imagine a room full of IV-Form enfant s icrribla at ‘ piep.’ \\lieic
the prefect’s ideal of discipline was to limit noiw demonstiation
so that the sound waves shall m no wise bieak upon the ear of the
Head Master. Then maybe a few moments of intense application
to the work of the hour, a little surreptitious sciibbling of imposition
lines, a generous exchange of tips as to the translation of a ‘ rotten ’
line, or the solution of a ‘ beastly lider Siah serious toil pioduced
a demand for relaxation, taking the foim of practical jokes played
by the shirkers upon those, especially, making some cfloi l at a sem-
blance of study. In the pandemonium Oslei might be seen grasping
his head, with thumbs in his ears, oblivious to eteiuhing but his
book ; till perhaps a paper dart, with or without inked point, loused
him to a consciousness of outward things. Retaliation followed as
a matter of course, but the deaf adder pose would be resumed so
soon as circumstances might permit. After one or two such experi-
ences the ‘pose was likely to be treated with due respect.

The much-dreaded Head Master established a lule that
roll-call would be held every two hours on holidays, but
nevertheless the boys on these days w ould take to the woods
for bird-nesting or hunting chipmunks, and one of them
recalls the chance discovery in the late autumn of a nest of
hibernating chipmunks which were slipped into his shirt
and carried to chapel, whereupon they revived and raced
around his anatomy. This must have kept him awake, but
doubtless took his attention from the lesson.

Among some of the early entries in Johnson’s field note-
book there is found a name which will frequently recur in
this story :

1859. Vine : transverse section, given me by Dr. BoveU.

1864. Part of scale of dog-fish, given me by Dr. Bovell.

1865. Fossil chalk from Barbadoes, given me by Dr. Bovell.

And in the summer of 1866, when he seems to have become

Act. i6 Introducing James Bovell 39

engrossed in mosses, there is this : ‘ § 384. 18/6/66. "Leaf
of moss (Dr. Bovell took it) ’ — and it is probable from what
is known of him that he forgot to return it ; but these
entries will suffice to introduce another character whose
influence upon Osier came in time to be even greater than
that of ‘ Father ’ Johnson himself. One of the Warden’s
sons writes :

. . . One thing I remember vividly — Old Bovell and my father
were (as usual, on days Bovell spent at the rectory) working at the
microscope case which had many tempting little drawers in it and
I (boylike) opened one of these drawers and seeing a small bone took
it out — when Old Bovell said in his fash, impetuous yet loving
manner : ‘ Don’t take that — that is one of the bones of Nebuchad-
nezzar’s Cat and you must not have it.’ It made an everlasting
impression on my boyish mind. That piobably occuned on one of
those days when Osier and myself were rewarded by being allowed
in my father’s study for bringing home a good haul of frogs — used
by Bovell and my father for studying the circulation of blood in the
fiog’s foot.

Doubtless drawn together by their mutual interests in
natural science, as biology was called in the days before
Huxley, Dr. James Bovell and the Rev. W. A. Johnson
had been acquainted for several years, and when the school
at Weston was projected and became accepted as the Trinity
College School under the authority of the Bishop, Bovell
was appointed its medical director. Though in practice in
Toronto and a teacher in the medical college, it was his
habit to spend a part of each week-end in Weston, quite
forgetful of his patients in all likelihood, absorbed with
Johnson in collecting, staining, and mounting specimens for
microscopical study. In this pursuit he must first have
encountered the dark-eyed enthusiastic head prefect who
used to accompany the Warden on his collecting expedi-
tions.

Though a high-spirited boy and the ringleader in many
escapades. Osier is said by his contemporaries to have been
so straightforward, manly, and clean — ‘ unobtrusively good
without sanctimonious pretence ’ — that he exerted a
splendid influence on the morale of the school. More-
over, at the end of the spring term as head of his class he
had received the Chancellor’s Prize, and it is not to be

40 Boarding-School Days june-Oct. 1866

wondered at that Johnson had set his heart on having
him, as well as another of the prefects — ‘Jones max.’
of the roll-call — return for an extra year, although both
had passed the subjects necessary for college. Osier had
returned to Dundas for the summer, and apparently it
was during this vacation, possibly as a by-play in connexion
with the excitement caused by the Fenian Raid, that he is
supposed to have drilled a company of youngsters for
military service. He may have volunteered for this task
under the influence of ‘ Captain ’ Goodwin’s tutelage ;
and Dundas, it may be recalled, was not far distant from
Fort Erie, which in June 1866 had been captuied by
O’Neil’s band. However this may be, of another episode
of the summer there exists written record. For there were
a number of attractive cousins, both Canadian and English,
who were visiting at the parsonage, and with each of them,
as is the way with seventeen, he probably fell successively
in love. This at least is to be gathered from letters of
warning against entanglements, which he received from his
elder sister after his return to school.

Meanwhile, during this summer vacation of 1866,

‘ Father ’ Johnson returns to his collecting, and the entries
begin with ^ June 20. Diatomes, desmids and congregating
algae put up in glycerine, water & spirit and fastened
immediately.’ Although he turns aside to examine the
stomachs of the katydid and dragonfly, and to investigate
butterfly eggs, the spores of rust, and much else besides,
by the time school reopened the Diatomaceae, Algae, and
Polyzoa seem to have become the dominant interest.^ In
this new subject, as would appear, the head prefect on
the reopening of school was quickly fired in turn, and the
valley of the Humber on many a half-holiday afternoon
doubtless saw the two together in quest of specimens, in
the collection of which the younger was the more persistent,
as time will show.

^ The home letters of the period (unfortunately none of
his own have been preserved) indicate that there are cricket

^ ‘ A History of tlie British Fresh-water Algae.’ By A. H. Hassall, London,
1857, is still among Johnson’s books, and probably was the source of this
new interest.

Aet. i 7 -i 8 Osteomyelitis a Blessing 41

matches, visits from the cousins, and a ‘ Grand Shine
regarding w^hich his mother writes a breathless sentence on
October 29th :

I do not know whether I can send you the wished for Dimes
because Papa is not home and I have no notes in the house, however,
if he comes in time I will enclose it as I suppose you want it before
the grand day of Games. And now what will you say when I tell
you that Marianne^ Jennette^ Ellen Mary and Charlotte are to be
with you on that day — and if you can escape from the Games to
meet them at the Station they will be glad to see you there, they are
(if all be well) to leave here hy the morning train^ lunch at the Toronto
Station, and on to Weston, and tf they should get an invitation to
remain the evening at the Grand Shine they would sleep at the Hotel
at Weston, returning to Toronto next morning, if not they will
return to Toronto and mean to stay there till Saturday or perhaps
Monday, if it is possible I would like you to write directly you get
this, so that we might get it by Wednesday evening, telling us if
the Games are really to come off and at what time, in fact tell us
all about it and if it will be possible for the girls to put up comfortably
in case they stay the night, they anticipate quite a pleasure trip
and are anxious to see their cousin Willie. I think you’ll like them,
we all do.

It was this autumn that in a rugby football scrimmage
he injured his shin so badly that he was laid up for some
weeks with what evidently was a severe osteomyelitis.
Affectionate and unbosoming letters which have been pre-
served were received from many of his old schoolmates —
from Ned Milburn, one of the ^ Barrie Bad Boys \ who
was already in his first year at Trinity, and from ‘Jemmy’
Morgan, another intimate of the Barrie days, who being
a few years his senior, was at this time teaching school in
Oakville, half-way between Toronto and Dundas. ‘ Father ’
Johnson rigged up for his damaged leg ‘ a common kind
of rest, such as is used in England largely by men who
suffer from the gout — a thing you could put your foot on
and it changes its position with your position in the chair h
During these weeks of enforced inactivity he sat much of
the time in the Warden’s study where the microscopical
specimens were prepared, and it is probable that the man
and boy had long talks together, and that the boy’s interest
in the microscope and what it might reveal was further
aroused at this time. It is probable, too, that being his

42 Boarding-School Days 1866-67

patient he came more intimately at this time in contact
with Bovell during the latter’s week-end visits at the school.

But troubles meanwhile were brewing for Father ’
Johnson. The daily control of the school was naturally
in the hands of the Head Master, but a number of the boys
still lived with the Warden at the rectory, and so came
under the Head Master’s eye during school hours only.
This division of authority was an inevitable source of
friction, for it is quite probable that some of the school
regulations were disregarded by the Warden, and as time
went on relations became strained. It was a case of incom-
patibility of temperaments. One can easily appreciate the
lack of sympathy 01 understanding on the part of a clasbicist
for a clergyman who was in a position to engage the atten-
tion of his pupils in such occupations as grinding bones
and teeth, the structure of which seems to have aroused
Johnson’s enthusiasm early in 1867.^ The first entry in
his specimen-book which mentions the name of his favourite
pupil was on January 22nd5 and on the same day tlie relic
of ^ Nebuchadnezzar’s Cat ’ seems to have been mounted
for study :

§ 505. 22/1/67. Crocodile scale giound b^v Oslei, giound iliruugh

§ 506. 22/1/67. Longitudinal sections of bone of a cat, brought
from the Pyramids of Goya (dry). Supposed to be 4000 years
old. The bone was given me by Dr. Bovell.

§ 51 1. 28/1/67. Tooth of Bear, transverse, this had lain a long

time in an Indian mound near Lambton, C.W. Turpentine
and Balsam.

§ 524. 29/1/67. Transverse section, half of palatal tooth of fish.
Given me by Dr. Bovell. Extremely hard. In the sat ,

§ 530. 7/11/67. Dentine Sc enamel of beaver mcisoi tooth, dry.

§540. ii/ii/67. Longitudinal section, leg bone of wild swan

^ Presumably Johnson’s interest in bones and teeth must have been
awakened either by the ‘Odontography’ (1840-5) of Sir Richaid Owen,
or his ‘ Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrates ’ which had just appeared,
though It is doubtful if he could have afforded to possess such expensive
volumes ; but his note-book shows that he had access to the Quarterly
Journal Microscopical Science^ London, the official organ of the Royal
Microscopical Society of which Owen was the first President and of W'hich
William Osier subsequently became a Fellow. Very probably they knew
also of the Micrographic Dictionary of Griffith and Henfrey, 2 vols.,
2nd ed., i860.

Aet. 17 Grinding Bones and Teeth 43

having a small poition of the hard pait of the cuticle. ‘Diy.
The bone is more brittle, & the haversians are more regular
than in the Goose.

§550. i2/ii/67. Trans® section, Human Fibula. This bone must
have lain many years in the ground ; it was taken from
•an Indian burying mound at Woodbridge, C.W. Put up in
inspissated Balsam (changed to Balsam, fure),

§ 566. 28/11/67. Transverse section leg bone of a cat, very thin,
diy. Cat was killed on the railway track during the winter.
Very pretty. Ground & finished by Jimmy.

The ^ Jimmy ^ of these notes was the Rector’s second son,
James Bovell’s namesake, who living in the parsonage far
from the Head Master’s reach could be called upon to
grind bones and teeth for his father at irregular hours
without fear of a birching. His elcler brother Jukes had
already gone up to Trinity College for a course preliminary
to medicine, where appeals from Osier apparently reached
him for bones of a variety Weston did not afford. During
these winter months of 1867 a goodly number of teeth, it
may be assumed, were also being ground in the irascible
Head Master’s room, though they did not come to be
listed among W. A. Johnson’s specimens. Far from it,
for the unsuspecting Warden ere long had his school taken
away from him by the machinations of others and transferred
elsewhere ; but this is perhaps another storyd By spring
the head prefect’s much discussed lame leg had so far
recovered that it no longer kept him from his favourite
expeditions, nor from engaging in cricket matches, to judge
from this letter to his cousin :

To Miss Jennette Osier from W. 0 , [no date]

... I have splendid times with Mr. Johnson out after specimens
of all sorts. I wish you had been with us last Tuesday down at the
Peat Swamp, there aie such splendid flowers down there and the
Moss is so nice and springy one would like to make a bed of it. We
got the smallest and rarest variety of Ladies Slipper or Indian
Moccasin plant. I would so like you to see them they are the most
beautiful of all Canadian wild flowers there are none about Dundas

^ The school was finally removed from the auspices of its founder and
established at Port Hope. Johnson was encouraged by his many sup-
porters to organize another school at Weston, and this he attempted, with
the Rev. Mr. Checkley, formerly of Barrie, as Head Master. The venture
was unsuccessful and was abandoned after a year or two.

Aet. 17 Diatomaceae and Polyzoa 45

of the numerous streams, and in the small lakes. It is not very
abundant in Quebec, but it has been found near St. Andrews, and
I obtained a beautiful specimen from Lake Memphremagog. I have
not seen it in the neighbourhood of Montreal. This species prefers
quiet, still waters, not too much exposed, nor of large extent and
subject to commotion from waves. Thus I have never found it in
Lake Ontario itself, but always in little sheltered marshy bays,
where it is found encrusting long, upright sticks, and the stems of
rushes. My attention was early directed to this form as it exists in
extraordinary profusion in the Desjardin Canal, which leads from
Burlington Bay to my native town of Dundas. The wooden sides
of the canal basin in the months of July and August are almost
uniformly covered with this magnificent species. The growth
begins about i-J- to 2 feet below the surface and extends in depth
for the same distance or even further, rarely, however, deeper than
six feet. The masses form extensive sheets usually a few inches in
thickness, or else beautiful symmetrical projections, 6-12 inches
in thickness, which spring either from a bed of the Polyps or are
isolated. In the summer of 1867, during a visit of my friend, the
Rev. W. A. Johnson of Weston, I showed him the masses and we
agreed to submit them to examination with the microscope, not
having any idea as to their real nature. Judge of our delight when
we found the whole surface of the jelly was composed of a collection
of tiny animals of surpassing beauty, each of which thrust out to
our view in the zoophyte trough a crescent-shaped crown of tentacles.
Recognizing it as a Polyp we were greatly exercised as to its position,
presenting as it did in the method of growth such variation from
the ordinary species described in our zoological text-books. Happily
in the American Naturalist for that year we met with Mr. Alpheus
Hyatt’s papers on the Fresh- water Polyzoa, then in course of publica-
tion, and obtained full information therefrom ... In some seasons
the luxuriousness of the growth of these creatures is extraordinary.
In the still, quiet water in the marsh on either side of Desjardin
Canal, just before it passes through the Burlington heights, I have
met with masses which would not go into a pail. The largest I have
ever seen lay at the bottom in about nine feet of water. I could
hardly believe it was a mass of Polyps, but to satisfy my curiosity
I stripped and went in for it. With the greatest difficulty I brought
it up in my arms, but could not get it out of the water for the weight,
which must have been close upon 25 lb. It resembled in form one
of those beautiful masses known as brain coral . . .

The end of July found master and pupil once more
together in Weston, where doubtless collecting, ^ in spite
of his poor leg ’, was again so ardently resumed that letters
home appear to have been somewhat slighted, if one may

46 Boarding-School Days July 1867

judge from his mother’s gentle hints. During their rambles
he and' ‘ Father ’ Johnson must have talked freely about
his future, and it was decided apparently that he should
go up to Trinity College, with the expectation of entering
the ministry. Another of the school prefects, L. K. Jones,
had made a similar choice of career, and they determined
to go to Oakville together and read up for the matriculation
examinations. The remaindei of the summer, therefore,
was passed at the house of the Rev. Mr, Fletcher on the
lake shore at Oakville, where they enjo}'ed the companion-
ship of ‘ Jemmy ’ Morgan, who recalls that after lessons
they would all sit up till midnight watching under a micro-
scope, borrowed from Dr. Bovell, the activities of fresh-
water algae.

Meanwhile in this year of 1867 the Canadian Con-
federation came into being, and ere long Ontario and
Quebec came, in the people’s minds, to take the place of
Upper and Lower Canada, and a sense of national life
began for the first time to be felt even in the smallest of
communities in the Dominion.

CHAPTER III

1867-70

TRINITY COLLEGE AND THE TORONTO
MEDICAL SCHOOL

OsLER went up to Trinity in the autumn of 1867, having
in his possession one of the Dixon Prize Scholarships which
he had well earned at Weston. Moreover, he apparently
had theology still in the back of his mind. Trinity College,^
it may suffice to say, was naturally enough regarded as
a nursery for the divinity faculty and most of the teachers
in the Arts course were clergymen, from among whom,
as has been seen, the visiting board for the school of Weston
were chosen. But not a few of these clergymen, like their
more famous prototypes Stephen Hales, Gilbert White, and
Joseph Priestley, were inclined to dabble in science and,
no less than W. A. Johnson, felt a consuming interest in the
phenomena of nature. One of them indeed, the Rev.
John Ambrey, Professor of Classics, was the donor of
a school prize for the best collection of geological and
entomological specimens. Ministers with an interest in the
natural sciences, particularly in those days when Wilber-
force and Huxley represented the antipodes of thought
and men’s minds were greatly unsettled over original sin
and Darwinism and Man’s Place in Nature, made dangerous
teachers for youths whom they expected to induct into
the Church. To them science was a pastime ; but the

^ The all-influential Bishop Strachan, acting upon an old Royal Charter,
had established a Church College — King’s — in 1842, to which a medical
department was attached. The Provincial Legislature in 1849 repealed the
earlier charter and designated the institution The University of Toronto.
A firm believer in the union of Church and State, with the Church in
control of education, Strachan had long been the uncompromising centre
of the fierce battles which had raged over the university question and the
clergy reserves. Undaunted by the action of the legislature, he secured in
1850 another Royal Charter for a Church of England University, which
became the University of Trinity College. The situation had its counterpart
in London, for King’s College was founded as an offset to the non-sectarian
University College where, as the Established Church claimed, no moral or
religious care was exercised over the students.

48 Trinity College Oct. 1867

pleasant avocation of one generation easily becomes the
vocation of the next, and his introduction to zoology must
already have done much to deflect the impressionable mind
of Osier from the very calling his revered preceptor expected
him to follow. It is quite certain, however, that the boy’s
mind was not fully made up until a year later, and it is
probable that his decision in favour of science became fixed
through the unconscious influence of James Bovell, who
himself, curiously enough, was in the process of changing
in the reverse direction from Medicine to the Church.
If Johnson’s influence over the schoolboy had been con-
siderable, that of Bovell was to become far more so, and
to be more enduring.

James Bovell was born in the Barbadoes in 1817, where
his father, an English banker, had long been resident.
Possessed of ample means, he went to England in 1834,
and after a short stay at Cambridge determined to study
medicine, entering Guy’s Hospital, where he became one
of Astley Cooper’s dressers and enjoyed the friendship of
Bright and Addison. His London University degree could
not be granted as he was two years under age, and to pass
the time he repaired to Edinburgh to study pathology
under Dr. Craigie and subsequently took his first doctor’s
degree in Glasgow. The next few years were passed in
Dublin under Stokes and Graves, who were at the height
of their fame. While there he was stricken with typhus,
and on his recovery instead of acting on the advice of
Stokes, who predicted a brilliant career for him in Great
Britain, he returned home to take up practice at Antigua,
whence in 1848 he was one of many wLo migrated from
the West Indies to Canada. He settled in Toronto, and
two years later with Dr. Hodder helped to organize a
medical department for Trinity College— the" Upper
Canada School of Medicine.^ In this school, w'hich for
the times was an excellent one, requiring an arts degree
for entrance, Bovell acted both as Dean and as Professor of

^ The history of the medical schools of Upper Canada is a long and com-
plicated one, with a succession of institutions which flourished, languished,
and died. The story up to 1850 is told in Wm. Canniff’s ‘ The Medical
Profession in Upper Canada, 1783-1850’.

Aet. i8 The many-sided James Bovell 49

the Institutes of Medicine : but the school had a S’hort
life, and though Bovell subsequently joined the Toronto
Medical School Faculty, he retained the Chair of Natural
Theology in Trinity, where until 1875 he lectured on
physiology and pathologyd His particular and favourite
course was on the subject of ‘physiology as related to
theological conceptions ’ !

With his four daughters Bovell lived on Spadina Avenue,
and the young Osier soon after his entrance to Trinity
began to frequent the place ‘ to keep the aquaria stocked with
pond material likely to contain good specimens of algae ’ ;
and also to gather and study a variety of animals which
shortly, overflowed to 112 St. Patrick Street after one of the
daughters married a Mr. Barwick and moved there to live.
Besides this, what engaged him as a first-year student at
the university, if it was other than what engages most
young men, is not recorded, though it is evident that he
repaired to Weston as often as week-ends and vacations
permitted, in order to go over with Johnson the accessions
to his zoological collection.

A few classroom note-books of the period have been
preserved. One of them starts out bravely, under the date
21/10/67, with ^ Latin Prose Comfosition’, and after the
first exercise there is written in the teacher’s hand, ‘ Very
good indeed my boy.’ But after November the exercises
cease to be copied out and the remainder of the book is
filled with notes regarding his fresh-water polyzoa : ‘ Genus I
Epithemia : adherent, quadrilateral ; valves circinate fur-
nished with transverse canaliculi,&c., &c.’ and there follows
a list of elaborately described specimens taken from Humber
Bay, Grenadier Pond, the Thames, London [Ontario of
course], Desjardin Canal, Burlington Bay, Sandy Cove,
together with other genera and species from the same and
other places ; from the sunken boat in the mouth of the
Humber often mentioned in W. A. Johnson’s note-book ;
Cyclotella Kutzingiana of which there are myriads in the
river at London ; from the Northern Railway wharf where
Navicula tumida are common ; from the Don River,

^ Cf Arthur Jutes Johnson on ‘ The Founder of the Medical Faculty’.
‘Irinity Vnwerstty Review, Jubilee No., June-July 1902, p. 104.

2923.1 E

50 Trinity College 1867-68

Ced^r Swamp, Weston ; and finally from Buckley’s water-
trough,- Dundas, which evidently found him at home for
Christmas.

It was Johnson’s custom to read aloud to the boys
in the parsonage, and for this purpose, as Osier recalled
in later years, he often selected extracts from such works
as the ‘ Religio Medici ’ ‘ in illustration of the beauty of
the English language But it must have been more than
this. That a high-churchman should have cared particu-
larly for Sir Thomas Browne is remarkable enough, but
that he should have been able to transmit this appreciation
to a boy of seventeen is truly amazing. It moreover is an
important thread which from this point weaves its way
through Osier’s story to the end ; and the 1 862 edition of
the ‘ Religio’, his second book purchase,^ to which he referred
more than once in his published addresses, was the very
volume which lay on his coffin fifty- two years later. In
Osier’s library alongside this particular book, handsomeh'
rebound and evidently much read despite the few marks
it contains, there always stood another volume in its
original covers entitled ‘ Varia : Readings from Rare
Books’, by J. Hain Friswell, London, 1866, which is
inscribed in his eldest brother’s hand : ‘ Wm Osier from
F. O. Xmas 1867.’ One of the best of the charming
essays this volume contains is upon Sir Thomas Browne,
and one may imagine a young man destined for the ministry
reading during his Christmas holidays about ‘ The Religion
of a Physician ’, and how few people there are who know
its author, mistaking him either for the facetious writer of
‘ Laconics ’ or the Tom Brown of Mr. Hughes’s imagina-
tion ; how he came to practise in Norwich and to write
his books ; how ‘ Sir Thomas grew pleasantly old, and
died as we have seen, boldly and manfully when his time
came ’ ; how he came to be buried there in St. Peter
Mancroft in 1682; how in 1840 his grave was despoiled

Osier has given the date of this purchase as 1867, but there are reasons
to believe that this was a slip of memory. The first book he bought was
the Globe Shakespeare which he said was afterwards stolen, and he often
invoked ‘ the curses of Bishop Ernulphus on the son of Belial who took it.’
His favourite copy of the ‘ Religio ’ was probably purchased in r868.

Aet. i8 Introduction to the ‘ Religio ’ 51

and his skull, rescued from private hands, came to adorn
the museum of surgery in Norwich, rendering prophetic
certain passages in his ‘ Urn Burial

It must have been shortly after this Christmas vacation
that the 1862 Ticknor and Fields (second) edition of the
Completed Works, dedicated to the authors of ‘ The
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ’ and of ‘ Rab and his
Friends ’, was purchased at W. C. ChitweU’s bookstore in
Toronto. There is written, at least, on the fly-leaf ‘ W.
Osier. Coll. S.S. Trin. Lent Term 28/2/68 ’. In the
book itself there are but three marked passages.^ Few
marks were needed, for only one other book, the Bible,
did he come to know more nearly by heart. One note is
dated Dec. 6, 1919, and will come later in these annals. Two
passages of the ‘ Religio ’ are marked by stars — one of them
the paragraph (p. 10) beginning ‘ Holy- water and crucifix
deceive not my judgement . . .’, the other the great para-
graph with which the essay opens :

For my religion, though there be several circumstances that might
persuade the world I have none at all, as the general scandal of my
profession, the natural course of my studies, the indifferency of my
behaviour and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently
defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention
opposing another ; yet in despite hereof I dare, without usttrpation,
assume the honourable style of a Christian.

The spring term of 1868 passed by without any definite
decision as to his future, though there are abundant straws
to indicate the direction in which he was tending. Early
in the year he had written his cousin Jennette : ‘ I attend
the Medical School every afternoon and I have been
grinding at Lyell’s “ Principles of Geology ” in vacation,
hoping to get through it before term begins, I am at
Dr. Bovell’s every Saturday and we put up preparations
for the microscope , . . Mrs, W. was here this morning and
told me about a stratum in the mountain which was full
of fossils ; but for the deep snow I would go up and get

^ Tkere are one or two corrections. Thus on p. 317 of * Urn Burial *
where Browne says ‘ Plato’s historian of the other world lies twelve days
uncorrupted &c , W. O. has changed ‘ twelve ’ to ‘ ten ’j. with marginal
reference to the ‘ Republic Bk. X.

Summer 1868

52 Trinity College

some for I have none from Dundas and they are difficult
to find:’ Moreover he had begun to make a collection of
entozoa, the earliest entry in the list bearing the date
‘ Feb’y yth, 1868’, and on these matters he probably
consulted Father Johnson, doubtless taking advantage of
these Weston visits to engage in the school sports. As
Mr. E. Douglas Armour of Toronto recalls :

He had left school in the summer of 1867, and I went there in the
autumn term. When the cricket season opened in 1868, he used to
come out to Weston where the school was then situate, to plap
cricket with us, and that -was when I first saw him. He was a lithe,
swarthy, athletic, keen-eyed boy. I don’t think I ever saw anyone
with such piercing black eyes. He desen^ed the encomium bestow^ed
by Horace on Lycus in Book I, Ode xxxii, both for his jet-black
hair and beautiful black eyes. He had a peculiar forward inclination
of the body as he walked, which caused his arms to hang slightly
forward and gave them an appearance of being always ready to use.
He was an excellent round-arm bowler, and a batter became distinctly
conscious of the strength of the lithe aim, which seemed to acquire
a great part of it from his determined and piercing glance as he
delivered the ball. You may think it strange that I should enlarge
upon this, but the fact that it is as distinctly impressed upon my
mind after a lapse of fifty-three years as if I had seen it yesterday
will indicate the strong personality that a boy of eighteen or nineteen
possessed.

Whether his college standing suffered because of these
pastimes does not appear ; probably not, for he acquired
knowledge readily. The examination papers of the next
June are preserved, and very stiff examinations they were,
held on successive days in Algebra^ Euclid^ Greek (Medea
and Hippolytus), the Catechism^ Trigofiometry, Latin Prose^
Roman History^ Pass Latin (Terence), Clasnc<! (Honours).
How he got through the trigonometry with his dislike for
mathematics is difficult to conceive. And certainly the
Catechism test was searching enough without the enchant-
ment of the polyzoa to have affected his choice of a career.
There were eighteen questions, such as these :

Show that the Holy Spirit is both a person and divine.

Eternal life is distinguished as being initial, partial, and per-
fectional. Explain and illustrate under each head from Scripture.

It is difficult for those of a later generation to imagine

Aet. 18-19 Theology Abandoned 53

the struggle and turmoil which in those days engaged ihen’s
minds. Following Cuvier and Owen, the doctrines and
theories of Lyell, Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley threatened
to split the very Church asunder. Some, like Wilberforce
in t.he Church, attacked them ; some, like Gosse in science,
did likewise, and one may imagine, it being but nine years
since ‘ The Origin of Species ’, that in discussion with his
favourite pupil Johnson faced the controversy fearlessly,
and that his attitude was not an ambiguous one. In those
days, moreover, it was still expected that the Anglican
Church would absorb one at least of a family of children,
but the youth of the day were graduating from Butler’s
‘ Analogy ’, which failed to satisfy them as it had satisfied
Newman. Subjects more appetizing than theological
revelation they were eagerly lapping up in an anonymous
volume, ‘ Vestiges of Creation ’, in Lyell’s ‘ Antiquity of
Man ’, in Herbert Spencer’s ‘ First Principles ’ and in
Huxley’s ‘ Lay Sermons and Addresses ’ which appeared
anti-theological to a degree.

^he Toronto Medical School

The summer of 1868 evidently was passed in gathering
further samples of algae from the waterways in and about
Dundas. Concerning one of these specimens — a mass of
Pectinatella found in an old submerged barge near the
mouth of the Humber — ^he consulted his botany teacher,
father of the Rev. Thomas Hincks, F.R.S., the authority
on the British polyzoa, into whose hands this rare finding
seems thereby to have fallen.^ He returned to Trinity
for his second year in Arts, but after enduring it for a few
days announced to his parents and to the Provost his
determination to go into Medicine. He had come to learn
his own mind and it appears to have been the only momen-
tous decision of his life — and there were many to make —
over which he long wavered. It must have caused some
disappointment at home, but if so his parents were not
of a sort to bring undue pressure to bear in influencing the

^ Cf. foot-note to Osier’s ‘ Canadian Fresh-water Polyzoa Canadian
Naturalist, 1883, new seiies, x, 406.

Toronto Medical School

54

I 868 -69

choice of a career for one of their sons. Even had they been
so inclined, Johnson and Bovell unconsciously drew him in
another direction. Another environment, an earlier decade,
would almost certainly have seen him enter the Church.

And what of his friends and preceptors ? Johnson .had
left the Army for the Church. His two sons chose for
Medicine, though one of them subsequent!}' took Holy
Orders. And Bovell in a few years came to do likewise ;
but at this time as soon as he heard of his young friend's
decision he exclaimed : ‘ That ’s splendid, come along

with me.’ This the boy literally did, and during the next
two years the two lived more like father and son than as
teacher and pupil. From the first he evidently entered
into his medical studies with the industry and enthusiasm
which characterized his relation to his choice of profession
to the end. A number of letters from his survi\ing class-
mates are unanimous in stating that he was exceptionally
studious and faithful in attendance at lectures ; that he
spent most of his hours in the dissecting-room and when
not so engaged was ‘ always to be found looking through
a microscope at Bovell’s cells ’ ; that he was a general
favourite not only with the class but with their preceptors,
of whom Hodder, Richardson, H. H. Wright, and of course
Bovell, are chiefly mentioned ; and that, when ‘ grinding ’
the class, the teachers were apt to turn to Osier when
others could not answer their questions. These letters,
too, uniformly testify to his companionableness, and state
that he was always ready for a frolic and bit of fun.

One of the sports indulged in to a very limited extent was bo.xing,
the champion being big John Standish who could box all day. He
had the strength of a giant with a kindly gentle heart and took care
never to hurt anyone. The students were amused one day to see little
Osier tackle the giant, and quite surprised to find that the little one
was almost the only member of the crowd who could strike Standish.

Of Bovell, likewise, many tales survive — tales which
emphasize his absent-mindedness — of his putting some
blisters on a patient and forgetting them until three weeks
later ; of losing his horse and buggy, which were found
standing before a house where he had called the previous
day. Dr. R. H. Robinson, a fellow student of Osier’s,

The Medical Student

Act. 19

55

writes that on one occasion he felt ill, and having consulted
Bovell at the Medical Building, was told to go to bed in his
boarding-house, and to remain there until Bovell called
the next morning. Bovell forgot about it until the third
day. and then took Osier with him, to look for the patient
somewhere on Grosvenor Street at a number he could not
remember. Robinson, who meanwhile had recovered,
was out walking and saw Bovell standing in the street in
evident distress while Osier was running from door to door
inquiring whether there was a sick man in the house.

It is not easy to trace the activities of a medical student
of fifty years ago, particularly of one who was habitually
reticent about himself, so that even were the letters of the
time preserved they would tell little. A visit must have
been made to Weston both at the beginning and end of
the Christmas recess, for under the dates ‘ ig/xii /68 ’ and
‘ 9/1/69 ’ Johnson records a number of microscopic speci-
mens such as : ‘ Trachea of a mouse given me by W. Osier.
Gly. beautifully stained.’ Inasmuch as there was no
course in histology in those days these specimens evidently
were prepared on his own initiative by Osier himself ;
and Johnson in return inscribed to him as a Christmas gift
Alpheus Hyatt’s ‘ Observations on Polyzoa, Suborder
Phylactolsemata ’ which had just appeared in the Proceed-
ings of the Essex Institute. Osier’s first appearance in
print describes an episode of this particular holiday season,
possibly under the influence of a morning’s perusal of
Johnson’s present. It was a short sketch entitled ^ Christmas
and the Microscope ’ which he sent to a semi-popular and
now extinct English] ournal devoted to nature study.^ As he
said years later, this was the beginning of his inkpot career
and showed his ‘ fondness, even at the very start, for tags
of quotations ; this one from Horace then a familiar friend.’

Nec iam sustineant onus,

Sylvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

might well be said of the Canadian woods and streams at this season
of the year. The earth has put on her winter robes, and under them

^ Hardwtche’s Sctence-Gosstp, Lond., 1870, v. 44. (Feb. I, 1869). Edited
by M. C. Cooke.

she hides most of those objects which in summer please and delight
us so much, A cheerless prospect for microscopists, one would
think. So I thought, as on Christmas I sallied forth with bottles
and stick in search of diatoms, infusoria, snou-peas, &c., though
I did not expect to be very successful. After wandering about for
some time, searching vainly for an unfrozen stream, I was about to
leturn home with empty bottles, when I suddenly bethought mvself
of an old spring which supplied several families with water, and
which I knew therefore would be unfrozen. In this country, wher-
ever there is a good spring some kind individual sinks a barrel for
the benefit of the community at large, and theieby benefits micro-
scopists in no small degree, for in these you aie generally sure to find
a good supply of microscopic objects. When I got to the spring
the first thing that greeted my sight was a piece of algae floating on
the top of the water, and on a closer examination of the barrel I saw
that the sides had a dark-brown coating, in w'hich I knew diatoms
and infusoria would be found. Scraping some of this ofi, I placed
it in a bottle and retraced my steps homeward, w^ell satisfied with my
afternoon’s walk. Getting home at that unfa-v ourable time for
working, just as the light is beginning to fail, I had to exercise my
patience and wait till evening to see what my bottle contained.
I had not long to wait, as darkness soon succeeds the light here ;
so when I had got a lamp lighted I proceeded to examine my spoils.
A short account of the things I found may not be uninteresting to
English readers of the Science-Qosstp as it will give them some idea
of what lovers of science meet with in this country. . . .

And the young microscopist of nineteen goes on to enumer-
ate the living ^ things ^ he was able to identify in his bottle
of water. Thus his holidays were passed, and the Easter
recess likewise found him collecting specimens in the region
around Lake Simcoe, a goodly number of which he for-
warded to Johnson from Sandy Cove and Kempenfelt Bay ;
and a week later on Ms way home, this from a horse-trough ;

28/iv/69. Alga? Tindyredia &c. in gathering from a hoibc-
trough on the road and hillside between Hamilton and Dundas,
sent me by post from W. Osier to see water bears ; did not find
any. In Hantz fluid and sealed immediately.

In spare hours during aU this first year he and Bovell were
doubtless much together, and the latter’s granddaughter

He was about twenty in those days and literally lived at our house
He adored Grandfather and the latter loved him like a son-S

Aet. 19-20 The Young Microscopist 57

they were both crazy about the microscope. Mother [Mrs. Bafwick]
says her life was a perfect burden to her with weird parcels" arriving
which might contain a rattlesnake, a few frogs, toads or dormice.
She found quite a large snake meandering around the study one
afternoon, and when she protested violently, the two told her she
should not have been in there. . . ,

The summer vacation was largely passed at home and he
must have attached himself to the family physician, Dr.
A. Holford Walker, for in a paper on appendicitis written
twenty years later, shortly after this malady received its
baptism, he recalls having seen with Dr. Walker during
this year of 1869 two cases in which the abscess had formed
and discharged in the groin. But he devoted himself
chiefly to his zoological collection, and from time to time
forwarded to Weston some new species from Niagara Falls
and elsewhere. Not only does Johnson’s familiar speci-
men-book duly record their receipt, but it makes clear also
that he again j oined his disciple in Dundas during September
for a series of excursions in and about their favourite
hunting-grounds, which evidently supplied the Warden
with material for study for some months to come.

Among Osier’s several student blank-books that have
been preserved is one bearing the date October i, 1869,
which is of no great significance except for one thing.
It contains a few pages of notes on chemistry and materia
medica (Nov. 3, ’69 to Feb. 9, ’70), but it is largely filled
with the next year’s lectures on obstetrics, chemistry, and
pathology taken at McGill. In pencil on the fly-leaf in
W. O.’s hand is : ‘ James Bovell, M.D., M.R.C.P. Prof.
Nat. Theology in Trinity College Toronto. Lecturer on
Institutes of Medicine, Toronto School of Med. Consulting
Physician to Toronto General Hospital. Physician to Lying-
in Hospital. Lay Secretary to Provincial Synod. Author of
Outline of Natural Theology, iAc. I 3 c. ^c. James Bovell.’
And through the book the name is scribbled whenever
a lapse appears to have occurred in the lecture, or the
student’s mind wandered — ‘ James Bovell M.D. M.R.C.P.’;
‘ James Bovell M.D’ The man must have come to exercise
an extraordinary influence over the boy, and to his last
days, as will be seen, in moments of absent-mindedness or

when trying a pen it was the name of James Bovell that
came first to paper, not his own.

In those days, before the multitudinous special sub-
divisions of medicine which have bid fair to crowd the
fundamentals out of the curriculum, the course of anatomy
extended over two years, and as the dissecting-room
represented the only laboratoiy to which a student had
access the abler ones revelled in it. The teachers of the
pre-clinical branches, moreover, were at the same time
practitioners ; and in a lecture on aneurysm ^ delivered
years later Osier wrote :

When a student in Toronto I occasionally visited the jail with out
teacher of Anatomy, Dr. J. H. Richardson, and among the prisoners
was an old soldier who had been discharged from the army after the
Crimean War for aneurysm of the aorta, so his papers said, and,
considering the large experience of the army surgeons with the
disease, it is not likely there could have been any mistake.-

He goes on to say that the old man died in 1885, thiily
years after the Crimean War, and Dr. J. E. Graham gave
him the specimen to be drawn and described — a healed
saccular aneurysm at the junction of the arch and descending
aorta. It is quite likely that these visits with his teacher
of anatomy aroused the inquisitive boy’s special interest in
aneurysm, so evident in his Montreal days ; but this is
anticipating. As has been stated, the outstanding recol-
lection of him on the part of his surviving fellow students
is that he was always dissecting. Dr. Albert MacDonald,
who was prosector in anatomy, recalls that he ‘ spent more
time in the dissecting-room than any other student, fre-
quently bringing his lunch with him in order to get some
extra time there. He did much of this work alone, working
out problems of his own in his own way, without the aid
of a demonstrator. Thus he pointed out the piesencc of

^ International Clinics, Phila., 1903.

* James Henry Richardson was Professor of Anatomy in the 'i'oronto
schools from 1850 to t.go2, and for the same period Surgeon to the ’I’oronto
Jail. He was a famous rifle-shot and fisherman, and is said to have chosen
the maple-leaf as the national emblem of Canada. To Richardson as well as
his other teachers in school Osier paid tribute in his address, ‘ The
Master Word in Medicine ’, given in 1903, on the occasion of the amalgama-
tion of the Toronto and Trimty Schools of Medicine.

Act. 20 Finding the Trichina Spiralis 59

the T richina spiralis in the muscles of one of the bodies,
which no one else had observed.’ This episode "of the
winter of 1870 sufficiently illustrates his characteristics,
not so much in that it shows unusually acute powers of
observation for a student, but rather in giving evidence of
his wide-awakeness and his ability to use acquired know-
ledge, for he had already seen the trichina under the
microscope, as is apparent from two sources — from Johnson’s
specimen-book as well as from a remarkable note-book
of this period kept by Osier himself, in which occur lists
of entozoa from all possible sources. Of this more will
be said in its proper sequence.

Another event, in this first year’s study, which had some influence
on my later life, was the discovery of the Tiichina spiralis. Dr.
Cobbold has told the story of the several steps leading to the dis-
covery and following it, m his latest work on the Entozoa. My
share was the detection of the ‘ worm ’ in its capsule ; and I may
justly ascribe it to the habit of looking-out, and observing, and
wishing to find new things, which I had acquired in my previous
studies of botany. All the men in the dissecting-rooms, teachers
included, ‘ saw ’ the little specks in the muscles : but I believe that
I alone ‘ looked-at ’ them and observed them : no one trained in
natural history could have failed to do so.

This paragraph was not written by William Osier, but
occurs in the short autobiography of Sir James Paget.^
The circumstances, however, were much the same, and
Osier with his instincts as a naturalist also ‘ looked-at ’ as
well as ‘ saw ’ the specks in his own turn. Literally, thou-
sands of sections were cut and studied ; specimens were
sent to Father Johnson; Bovell doubtless became inter-
ested; innumerable feeding experiments were performed
in the attempt to infect other animals, for at the time but
little was known of the disease in America. Some six years
later, in his first paper on the subject, Osier wrote :

When a student with Prof. Bovell of Toronto I had several oppor-
tunities of studying these parasites. In the month of February 1870
while dissecting a subject with Dr. Zimmerman in the Toronto
School of Medicine, we discovered numerous trichinae thoughout
the whole muscular system, all of which were densely encysted, many

t The discovery was made in 1835. Cf. ‘Memoirs and Letters of Sir
James Paget Longman & Co., Lond., igoi, p. 9 S-

having become calcihed. From a single drachm of one of the muscles
of the arm I obtained 1 59 cysts, the greater number of which enclosed
healthy-looking worms. This man was a Geiman, and had been
janitor at the hospital, where I had known him for over t\io years.i

It is interesting that he says ‘ a student with Prof.
Bovell rather than a student at the Toronto Medical
School, and it is characteristic also that he links^ the name
of his schoolmate with the discovery, for it is evident from
the personal notes accompanying his list of cntozoa that it
was his own.

This new and consuming interest in the entozoa had
been awakened some time before — indeed,^ when he was
still at Trinity, the earliest specimen which he records
being under the date ‘ 7/ii/68 ’ ; but it was not until
January ist of 1870 that he began systematicaUy to nrake
a list of his specimens in a blank-book and to give detailed
explanatory notes. It was quite consistent with w'hat was
still under way in his study of the Diatomaceae and fresh-
water polyzoa, but it illustrates the formative stage of his
habit of observing, collecting, recording, and tabulating
specimens of cases, and thus preparing material for future
publications. Many of the specimens are evidently carried
or sent to Johnson, who duly makes such entries as this :
Ԥ1315. Entozoa from the mucous stomach of a bat,
given me by W. Osier and put up by him.’ Johnson’s
interest in this new subject is obviously aroused, though
the preparations all appear to have been mounted by his
young friend, who is rapidly forging ahead of him. Even
when Osier’s name is not mentioned, the source of many
of Johnson’s specimens may be easily traced. Thus :

22/1V/70. § 1388. Parasites on fins, body, &c., of little fish in my
aquarium. They seem to have a chitinous horseshoe-shaped
piece inside, & are large brown-looking things ivith powers of
locomotion & short cells all lound the edges. . . .

Whereas in Osier’s records occur three corresponding
entries, the first of which reads ;

2i/iv/70. On the fins of chub in the Rev. W. A. Johnson’s

^ ‘Trichina Spiralis.’ Canadian Journal of Medical Science, May 1876,
1. 175.

Aet. 20

Interest in Entozoa

6i

aquarium were noticed several round white spots. These on
examination proved to be some sort of Entozoa. In addition
to these, some yellow spots were seen which seem to be a more
advanced condition of the parasite. (See slide . . .)

Another entry the following day records the catching of
a pike 2 ft. 7 in. long, from which he obtained ‘ 68 speci-
mens of Taenia and two or three small Ascaridae ’, the
microscopical characteristics of which he proceeds to describe
in detail. In no sense a Waltonian, as his son came to be.
Osier nevertheless could endure fishing when it furnished
side-interests of this sort, though it was easier for him on
the whole, as his note-book shows, to get his specimens
from the fish-market.

There can be little doubt that had William Osier at this
time come under the influence of Leidy or Agassiz or
possibly of Huxley, he would have gone on with his biological
studies and abandoned medicine ; for aside from his oppor-
tunities in the dissecting-room it would appear that the
school was not proving a great success, and his lecture
notes, with their ‘ James Bovell M.R.C.P.’ scribblings,
would indicate that his mind was not captured by the
lectures. There is possibly one thing that might have
deterred him, his ineffectiveness with his pencil, for though
many of the sketches of his specimens are probably accurate
enough they are lacking in any artistic quality — the only
accomplishment in which the Rev. W. A. Johnson excelled
his pupil. However this may be, he persisted in sketching
as best he could what he saw under the microscope, and
his copious notes with their accompanying illustrations of
diatoms, polyzoa, and entozoa are comparable to those
accompanying the notes made later on in Montreal and
London when he was poring over blood specimens ; those
made in Philadelphia when absorbed in the malarial
parasite ; and those made during the first year in Baltimore
on the amoebae of dysentery, which practically ended his
days with the microscope. The method of the pursuit in
each instance was the same, and though occasionally he
ventured to reproduce some of his own sketches in his
early papers, the art of illustration was not his best card.
In all these extra-curricular pursuits, though his name

appears less frequently than that of Johnson, Bovell probably
figured largely, for they were much together. Nearly fifty
years later Osier wrote :

It has been remarked that for a young man the privilege of brow sing
in a large and varied library is the best introduction to a general
education. My opportunity came in the winter of ’69- 70. Having
sent his family to the West Indies, Dr. Bovell took consulting rooms
in Spadina Avenue not far away from his daughter Mrs. Barwick,
with whom he lived. He gave me a bedroom in the house, and my
duties were to help to keep appointments — an impossible job ! —
and to cut sections and prepare specimens.^ Having catholic and
extravagant tastes he had filled the rooms with a choice and varied
collection of books. After a review of the work of the day came the
long evening for browsing, and that winter [1869-70] gave me
a good first-hand acquaintance with the original works of many of
the great masters. After fifty years the position in those rooms of
special books is fixed in my mind. Morton’s ‘ Crania Americana
Annesley’s ‘ Diseases of India ’ with the fine plates, the three volumes
of Bright, the big folios of Dana, the monographs of Agassiz. Dr.
Bovell had a passion for the great physician-naturalists, and it was
difficult for him to give a lecture without a reference to John Hunter.
The diet was too rich and varied, and contributed possibly to the
development of my somewhat ‘ splintery ’ and illogical mind ; but
the experience was valuable and aroused an enduring interest in
books. In such a decade of mental tumult as the ’6o's, really devout
students, of whom Dr. Bovell was one, were sore let and hindered,
not to say bewildered, in attempts to reconcile Genesis and Geology.
It seems scarcely credible, but I heard a long debate on Philip
Henry Gosse’s (of, to me, blessed memory) ^ Omphalos, an Attempt
to Untie the Geological Knot A dear old parson. Canon Read,
stoutly maintained the possibility of the truth of Gosse’s view that
the strata and the fossils had been created by the Almighty to test
our faith ! A few years ago, reading ‘ Father and Son ’ which
appeared anonymously, the mention of this extraordinary ‘ Omphalos’
work revealed the identity and, alas ! to my intense regret, the
personality of the father as Philip Henry Gosse.

Of this mental struggle the students reaped the benefit — for Dr.
Bovell was much more likely to lecture on what was in his mind
than on the schedule, and a new monograph on Darwin or a recent
controversial pamphlet would occupy the allotted hour. One
corner of the library was avoided. With an extraordinary affection
for mental and moral philosophy he had collected the works of
Locke and Berkeley, Kant and Hegel, Spinoza, and Descartes, as well
as those of the moderns. He would joke upon the impossibility of
getting me to read any of the works of these men, but at Trinity,

Aet. 20 Bovell’s Consulting Room 6 ^,

in I attended his lectures on Natural Theology, an’d he

really did get us interested in Cousin and Jouffroy and others of the
French School, Three years of association with Dr. Bovell were
most helpful. Books and the Man ! — the best the human mind has
afforded was on his shelves, and in him all that one could desire in
a teacher — a clear head and a loving heart. Infected with the
^sculapian spirit he made me realize the truth of those memorable
words in the Hippocratic oath, ‘ I will honour as my father the man
who teaches me the Art.’ ^

In regard to the ^ consulting rooms ’ referred to in the
foregoing, tradition has it that the venture was entered
upon at Osler^s suggestion, with the object of starting
a consulting practice for Bovell and of obliging him thereby
to collect his fees. The partnership is said to have con-
tinued for about a year, and apparently the business
methods, or lack of them, of the senior partner, in the end
prevailed. Dr. R. B. Nevitt, who entered Trinity as one of
Osier’s contemporaries, writes that ^ he brought there no
marked reputation except that he was a good fellow and
held the distance record for throwing a cricket-ball He
says further :

One afternoon I had some engagement with W. O. and called for
him at Bovell’s office. The room was large and bare with a few
chairs and a small deal table — like a kitchen table. Osier opened
the drawer of the table — Dr. B. had gone out — and said : ‘ Look
here ! This drawer has been filled to overflowing with bills two or
three times this afternoon and now look.’ One solitary bill lay in
the drawer. As the patients paid their fees Osier placed them in the
drawer. A needy patient came along, and Dr. B, reversed the
process and handed money out so that the sick man might get his
medicine and the food and other things required.

Many other stories of Bovell could be told — many of
them probably true and many of them having Osier as an
appendage. The older man was adored by all the students,
though it could never be told whether the topic of his
lecture was going to be medical or theological, or indeed
whether he would remember to come at all ; and on
occasions, both at Trinity and the medical school, it
devolved upon Osier to give his lecture for him. It was
during the spring of 1870, despite all of his accumulating

^ Introduction to ^ Bibliotheca Osleriana ’ (in the press).

interests, that Osier began visiting the veterinar}- hospital,
possibly dravpn there in the first place by his interest^ in
comparative parasitology and in the expectation of adding
to his grovring collection of entozoa — an expectation fully
realized^ Nevertheless he found time to prepare for
publication the results of his studies on the Diatomaceae
and to forward the manuscript to Principal Dawson of
McGill, who was at the same time President of the Natural
History Society of Montreal.^ This, his second appearance
in print. Osier introduced with this paragraph :

Among the many beautiful objects which the microscope has
revealed to us, none, perhaps, aie such general favourites (especially
with the younger microscopists) as the Diatomaceae. Their almost
universal distribution — the number of species — and above all, the
singular beauty and regularity of their maikings — have all tended
to make them objects of special interest and study. In the following
paper I propose to give briefly the principal points connected with
their life, history and structure, together with a list of those species
I have met with in Canada . . .

The article, as W. T. Councilman has said,'* contains ‘ an
admirable description of the structure, mode of division,
and propagation of the diatom, evidently based on personal
observation There is mention of a ‘ diatom-prism
which he has been enabled to use through the kindness of
Professor Bovell ; due acknowledgement of his obligations
to the Rev. W. A. Johnson is made ; and he proceeds to
enumerate no species in 31 genera collected from the
haunts with which the reader has become familiar — the
Don River, the cedar swamp of Weston, the wharves at
Toronto, the sunken boat at the mouth of the Humber,
Lake Simcoe, the Welland Canal, Coote’s Paradise, the
Niagara River, and so on — and he adds : ‘ Many more no
doubt will be found as the number of practical micio-
scopists increases in the countiy.’ One or another of thes6
familiar haunts finds him at the close of school adding to

^ Quite consistent with this were his subsequent associations with the
veterinarians at McGill.

2 The paper was not presented before the Society until the October
meeting, though it was published in the June volume of the Transactions.

^ ‘ Some of the Early Medical Work of Sir William Osier.’ Johjis Hopkins
Hospital Bulletin^ July 1919.

Aet. 21

Collecting Entozoa 65

the collection of entozoa obtained from a variety of creatures
which were hooked, trapped, or shot — including a large
male skunk ! And later on at Dundas he continues through
July, August, and September with this same exciting quest
of the parasites in beast, bird, and fish :

i3/viii/70. Shot a kingfisher. A few small Diatoms were
found in the liver. The small fish which constitute the food
of this bird seem not to share in the common fate of fish, inas-
much as few or immature entozoons were found in them,
&c., See,

On other days he shoots a hawk, or hooks a large black
bass in Burlington Bay, or examines ten sunfish caught in
the canal, and so on — a combination of sport and science,
with the chief emphasis on science, to judge from the
elaborate notes on his pathological findings and the scant
reference to their source. Johnson must have paid another
visit to Dundas early in August, for on the i6th he wrote
an amusing bread-and-butter letter which Osier had pre-
served, and a few days later sent the following remarkable
note, doubtless believing that the young student of entozoa
was capable of an investigation which might have anticipated
Theobald Smith :

T 0 W, O.from Rev, W, A, Johnson, The Parsonage, Weston, Ont.

23 Aug* 1870.

My dear Osier, — The cows &c. round us are all afflicted &
several dying from what appears to be the bite of the little fly that
teazes horses so much just now. I went out yesterday & captured
8 or 10 on the fences & sides of an old horse & by the time I got
into the house from Holley’s field there were 8 small maggots in the
clean bit of paper. These were extruded from one of the flies.
Question, Is this little fly known to be a vivipositor ^ If so, are these
Maggots adapted to live in the skin of a living animal ? The sores
on the cows legs bags, &c., would show this. Could not you inspect
them. The country would be benefited by knowing, because the
papers are writing about a disease P Come over & have a look.
In the mean time I will drop a line to Bethune & Hincks & find
out (if they can tell me) whether said fly is a vivipositor.

Yours sincerely

W. A. Johnson.

During this summer vacation, if not before, Osier had
determined, in all probability on BovelPs advice, to leave

56 Toronto Medical School Summer 1870

the 'Toronto School for McGill, for it must have been
apparent to both of them that the clinical opportunities in
the Montreal hospitals, which were more open to students,
far exceeded those which Toronto then oftered. Bovell
had gone to the West Indies for the summer, and before
leaving must have known of his pupiFs decision, and have
given him a letter to Palmer Howurd, then Piofessor of
Medicine at McGill But at the time Bovell seems to have
given no intimation that he himself might not return, and
though rumours to this effect had reached Osier during
the summer through letters both from Johnson and from
his son, BovelFs namesake, the following from Bovell himself
made the matter final, and must have reconciled Osier to
his own first migration.

To W, O.fiom James Bovell, Spring-Well near Chailes Tovn

Nevis West Indies.

August I ith [1870].

My dear Osier, — ^My last will have given you some general idea of
the outline of Nevis and its gorges. This will not add much local
news as I am not yet settled and cant yet get myself used to the idea
that I may not get back to Canada this year. I now write to beg
you to see that all my Microscopical Apparatus is veiy carefully
packed — all the things being taken out of the very large binocular
case and made to fit the smaller binocular. All the object glasses
carefully put in the cases and a case made for the instrument in the
Cabinet — ^The Specimens looked over and packed. You are to have
my surgical instruments and Stethoscopes but send my Clinical
Thermometer. I dont want to keep the monster Microscope stand
and Eye pieces so if you like to pack carefully all the rest of the
apparatus up, you can have as a present the stand and Eye-pieces.
I will next mail write you the name of the Merchant at Halifax
who ships goods out to this place and if the Express will take the
things down to Halifax they can come out here to me— but any
thing must be put up and packed in book-binders shavings papers.
I am going into the large Star-fishes of which there are many to be
had. out here and I am watching repair in Lizards and tubercle in
Guinea pigs the last are only now breeding so I shall not have enough
to begin with before October, but it is an advantage to have them.
The Lizards here are very large and I hope for some good results.
The [Toronto] School paid very little this year so I am not sorry to
leave it although I do care a great deal leaving Richardson and my
old friends of years— I cant think of Johnson without a choking for
we are brothers of years afl^ection and not even you can know how

Aet. 21 Bovell leaves Toronto 67

deeply I love him. I am however not acting from choice buf from
necessity and duty. I have made a purchase which if watched and
cared will be a fortune to my children and however little I may
benefit it is to them every thing that I should be here to see after
its development. I hope to be in Toronto in June unless Mrs
Barwick comes this way to avoid a Canadian summer. I have not
a bit of thin glass to see anything with. The i/8th was done for
by its fall and Gannot could do nothing with it. It got a crack
right through it- — I do hope you will work on for I have quite made
up my mind that you are to get a first Class for the East India
Compy. Write me all the news and fully — ^Do look after my Micro-
scopes and see to them — Give my love to your good Father and to
all who ask for me. I write you again by next mail — Love for you
dear boy. affect^

J. Bovell.

It has been said of Bovell, perhaps by Osier himself/
that in spite of his rich mental endowment there was, from
attempting too many things, a want of that dogged per-
sistency of purpose without which a great work can scarcely
be accomplished and he adds : ^ It may be well for
a physician to have pursuits outside his profession, but it is
dangerous to let them become too absorbing.’ It was
perhaps just as well that Osier at this time was destined to
come under the steadying influence of a less brilliant
personality. Nevertheless, in spite of, or because of, Bovell,
it is apparent that in this last year at Toronto Osier laid
the foundations of what were to be his subsequent habits
of life. The cornerstone of the foundation was work and
the finding of this a pleasure. To this were added three
qualities, of which he speaks in a later address ^ to medical
students : the Art of Detachment, the Virtue of Method,
the Quality of Thoroughness ; and to these he adds a
fourth as essential to permanence — the Grace of Humility.
He commends to them what obviously he had by this
time learned himself :

In the first place, acquire early the Art of Detachment^ by which
I mean the faculty of isolating yourselves from the pursuits and
pleasures incident to youth. By nature man is the incarnation of
idleness, which quality alone, amid the ruined remnants of Edenic

^ Cf. an unsigned obituary notice in the Canadian Journal of Medical
Science^ 1880, v, 114.

^ ‘ Teacher and Student.’ 1893.

68

Toronto Medical School Aug -Sept. 1870

characters, remains in all its primitive intensity. Occasionally we
do find an individual who takes to toil as others to pleasure, but the
majority of us have to wrestle hard with the original Adam, and find
it no easy matter to scorn delights and live laborious days. Of
special importance is this gift to those of you who reside for the
first time in a large city, the many attractions of which offer a serious
obstacle to its acquisition. The discipline necessary to secure this
art brings in its train habits of self-control and forms a valuable
introduction to the sterner realities of life.

Twenty- three years later in an address ^ given in Toronto
on the occasion of the amalgamation of the Toronto and
the Trinity Schools of Medicine, Osier paid the following
^ tribute of filial affection ’ to the man from whom he was
now in this summer of 1870 to become separated :

There are men heie to-day who feel as I do about Dr. James
Bovell — that he was of those finer spirits, not uncommon in life,
touched to finer issues only in a suitable environment. Would the
Paul of evolution have been Thomas Henry Huxley had the Senate
elected the young naturalist to a chair in this university in 1851?
Only men of a certain metal rise superior to their surroundings, and
while Dr. Bovell had that all-important combination of boundless
ambition with energy and industry, he had that fatal fault of diffuse-
ness, in which even genius is strangled. With a quadrilateral mind,
which he kept spinning like a teetotum, one side was never kept
uppermost for long at a time. Caught in a storm which shook the
scientific world with the publication of the ‘ Origin of Species
instead of sailing before the wind, even were it with bare poles, he
put about and sought a harbour of refuge in writing a work on
Natural Theology which you will find on the shelves of second-hand
bookshops in a company made respectable at least by the presence
of Paley. He was an omnivorous reader and transmuter, he could
talk pleasantly, even at times transcendentally, upon anything in the
science of the day, from protoplasm to evolution ; but he lacked
concentration and that scientific accuracy which only comes with
a long training (sometimes, indeed, never comes) and which is the
ballast of the boat. But the bent of his mind w^as devotional, and,
early swept into the Tractarian movement he became an advanced
Churchman,^ a good Anglican Catholic. As he chaffingly remarked
one dty to his friend the Rev. Mr. Darling, he was like the waterman
in ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress rowing one way, towards Rome, but looking
steadfastly in the^other direction, towards Lambeth. His ‘ Steps to
^ Lectures on the Advent ’ attest the earnestness
of his convictions ; and later in life, following the example of Linacre,

^ ‘ The Master Word in Medicine 1903.

Aet. 21

A Tribute of Filial Affection

69

he took orders and became another illustration of what- Cotton
Mather calls the angelical conjunction of medicine with divinity.
Then, how well I recall the keen love with which he would engage
in metaphysical discussions, and the ardour with which he studied
Kant, Hamilton, Reid and Mill. At that day, to the Rev. Prof.
Bevan was intrusted the rare privilege of directing the minds of the
thinking youths at the Provincial University into proper philo-
sophical channels. It was rumoured that the hungry sheep looked
up and were not fed. I thought so at least, for certain of them, led
by T. Wesley Mills, came over daily after Di. BovelFs four o’clock
lecture to reason high and long with him

On Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,

Fixed Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge absolute.

Yet withal his main business in life was as a physician, much sought
after for his skill in diagnosis, and much beloved for his loving heart.
. . . When in September 1870 he wrote to me that he did not intend
to return from the West Indies I felt that I had lost a father and
a friend ; but in Robert Palmer Howard, of Montreal, I found
a noble step-father, and to these two men, and to my first teacher,
the Rev. W. A. Johnson, of Weston, I owe my success in life — if
success means getting what you want and being satisfied with it.

CHAPTER IV

1870-2

THE McGILL MEDICAL STUDENT

In a later address ^ Osier gave the following thumbnail
account of his two years in the McGill Medical School :

When I began clinical work in 1870, the Montreal General Hospital
was an old coccus- and rat-ridden 2 building, but with two valuable
assets for the student — much acute disease and a group of keen
teachers. Pneumonia, phthisis, sepsis and dysentery were rife. The
‘ services ’ were not separated, and a man for three months looked
after medical and surgical patients, jumbled together in the same
wards. The physic of the men who were really surgeons was better
than the surgery of the men who were leally physicians, which is
the best that can be said of a very bad arrangement. . . . Scottish
and English methods prevailed, and we had to serve our time as
dressers and clerks, and, indeed, in serious cases we very often at
night took our shaie in the nursing. There were four first-rate
teachers of medicine on the staff — Howard, Wright, MacCallum
and Drake — three of whom had learned at first hand the great
language of Graves and of Stokes. The bedside instruction was
excellent and the clerking a serious business. I spent the greater
part of the summer of 1871 at the hospital, and we had admirable
out-patient clinics from Dr. Howard, and a small group worked in
the wards under Dr. MacCallum. An excellent plan, copied from
an old custom of the Lancet, was for the clinical clerk to report the
cases of special interest under Hospital Practice in the local medical
monthly. My first appearance in print is in the Canadian Medical
and Surgical Journal, reporting cases from Dr. MacCallum’s wards.
Our teachers were men in whose busy lives in large general practice
the hospital work was a pleasant and a profitable incident. A man
like Palmer Howard got all that was possible out of the position,
working hard at the hospital, studying the literature, writing excel-
lent papers, and teaching with extraordinary care and accuracy ;
naturally such a man exercised a wide influence, lay and medical.
I left the old General Hospital with a good deal of practical experience
to my credit and with warm friends among the members of the staff.

On his way to Montreal Osier appears to have stopped
at Weston, and while there must have been consulted
regarding Jimmie ’ Johnson’s choice of a career : Father ’
Johnson at least sent after him post-haste a letter on the

^ ^The Medical Clinic’ : British Medical Journal, Jan. 3, 1914.

2 Rat-nddled ? ‘ At the foot of your rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs

Aet. 21 McGill in the ’70's 71

subject, though a scoop from the Grenadier Pond* was
evidently a matter of greater concern at the moment, and
‘ Jim ’ must wait. His English cousins, Marian and
Jennette, the former now Mrs. Francis, had returned to
Canada two years previously, and had settled at Montreal.
Featherstone Osier in a letter to his sister Elizabeth in
Cornwall mentions that ‘ Willie has gone to McGill College
where the hospital advantages are greater than at Toronto.
I wish to give him every advantage in my power though it
is very expensive. Chattie went with him for a visit to
Marian. She has not been very well lately and we thought
a change would do her good.’

Montreal in the ’70’s and for some years to come had
unquestionably the best medical school in Canada, and the
opportunities offered to students were possibly rivalled by
those in only one city in the States — namely, in Philadelphia.
The McGill school, founded by Scotchmen, had from its
inception closely followed the educational methods in
vogue at Edinburgh, where only the year before, a young
man named Joseph Lister had been called from Glasgow
to succeed Syme as Professor of Surgery. The school,
moreover, was in the process of being moved from its old
site on Cote Street to the university grounds, where a new
building, whose foundations were laid in 1869, had just
been completed. The ‘ hospital advantages ’ spoken of by
Osier’s father were those at the Montreal General, which
like the Edinburgh hospitals was in close affiliation with
the school, and students were given a degree of freedom in
the wards such as existed in no other large hospital on the
continent. In the Upper Canada schools at Toronto and
Kingston, on the other hand, traditions of the great
London hospitals largely prevailed — traditions in them-
selves as worthy of emulation as those of Edinburgh, but
one only needs to consult the Canadian medical journals of
the late ’6o’s and early ’70’s to learn that in Toronto much
dissatisfaction was rife, and that the staff and the trustees
of the Toronto General Hospital were at loggerheads over
matters relating to medical instruction.^

^ In September of 1869 the Canadian Medical Association had met in
Toronto, at which time Palmer Howard, the Professor of Medicine at McGill

72 The McGill Medical Student Oct. 1870

A number of students had already gravitated to Montreal
from Toronto, and among those living on Lower St. Urbain
Street were six of Osier’s particularly intimate friends :
‘Charlie’ Locke and Clarkson McCoiikey, former school-
mates at Barrie, Thomas Johnson of Sarnia, Keefer, later of
the Indian Army, Arthur Browne of Montreal, and Harry P.
Wright of Ottawa. They were a youthful group, most of
them graduating before they were of sufficient age to
receive their diplomas, but they were of robust appearance,
and this ‘ St. Urbain clique ’ came to be known as the
‘ bearded infants Harry Wright, who became Osier’s
room-mate, is said always to have laughed in later years
when Osier’s mame was mentioned, and one may imagine
that his love of innocent fun and addiction to surprising
pranks was rampant at this time, though a greater love of
serious work was becoming deeply ingrained. These two,
Harry Wright and Osier, were taken up by Palmer Howard,
and came to be constant visitors in his household, where
Sunday dinner always found them.

To judge from Osier’s student note-books, Howard must
have been a systematic teacher of the old school, one who
presented his topic under headings in a way very gratifying
to students, ‘ Zymotic diseases : due to a specific poison.
They have been called miasmatic and the poison which
produces them has been called morbid, etc.’, and there is
a good deal of stress laid on therapeutic measures, all of
which sounds rather old-fashioned — this presentation of
medicine of fifty years ago. Throughout, the young student
is evidently very attentive and has less temptation, or less
opportunity perhaps, to scribble his favourite preceptor’s

and President of the Association, had read two notable reports on preliminary
and on professional education in medicine. He had recommended not only
a high standard for matriculation with examination requirements, but
a four-years’ professional course of nine instead of the usual six months and
no diploma to be given before the age of twenty-one was attained. It is of
interest that Dr. Davis, of Chicago, the founder of the American Medical
Association, was present at the meeting and urged the Canadians to adhere
to these high standards as the example would be an influence in the establish-
ment of something comparable to them in the States. There was much
discussion over these matters which must have reached the ears of the
students.

Aet. 21

Johnson’s Admonitions 73

name on the pages, as he comes later to do while taking
lecture-notes on mental diseases, medical jurisprudence,
materia medica, and chemistry, fragments of which are in
these same student volumes.

From W, A, Johnson to W, 0 , The Parsonage, St. Philip’s,

Weston. 20th Octb 1870.

My dear Osier, — Your kind letter was duly received and gave me
much pleasure. I hope your connection with McGill will prove an
advantage to you in many ways. The size of the city and its various
opportunities may prove of service alone, and the change of ideas
together with seeing and knowing different persons ought to be of
great service too. Jimmy tried the examination and failed not in
things of any importance, but as the examination was suited chiefly
for aged school masters and such like [etc.]. ... I send you by this
mail a little bottle which you will easily get at by picking away the
corks with your pen knife at both ends and the bottle will drop
out. It contains specimens of my stranger. Vaginicola? I suppose
but can not find anything in my illustrations like it. The two that
are attached, one to a green leaf, the other a dry, were free when
I put them into a saucer. No doubt some naturalist will tell you
the name. If so let me know. The tentacles are very like those of
Hydra. ... I send you also a copy of Taylor’s Holy Living. I have
returned to my habit as a boy of reading a few lines of it every
morning before going downstairs, and am not a little pleased to see
in it the origin of all my religious that is practically religious
ideals. It is a little book well worth using as a friend. Its teaching
is higher than any High Churchism of the present day and in many
things more plainly to the point. Liking Sir T. Browne as you do,
you will be pleased with it and I trust and pray it may long be your
friend and companion. We have not anything new doing here.
The Dr [Bovell] is not likely to return this year. . . . Remember me
very kindly to your Sister and tell me who you find in Montreal to
talk to about religious or Church matters, as well as scientific. Let
me hear from you frequently. It is a sort of duty I would like to
exact from you, as well as a great pleasure to me. Hoping it will
please God to bless you with health of mind and body and a strong
zeal for others welfare believe me Very faithfully yours

W. A. Johnson.

The young Osier must have pondered considerably over
this letter, for ^ James Bovell, M.D., M.R.C.P.’ is tvritten
meditatively on its margins. Father ’ Johnson, apparently
somewhat upset by his son’s failure to meet the matricula-
tion requirements, expresses relief at his entering Trinity,

74 The McGill Medical Student Autumn 1870

and quickly passes on to more agreeable subjects — to things
put up in balsam and glycerine, and to matters of religion.
He makes no mention of his own troubles, which must have
been acute at this time, for he was in open opposition to
his bishop, and the school he had founded was taken away
from him in this year of 1870, and moved to its present
home at Port Hope. Johnson, alas, was in matters of
theology a born controversialist, and it is not unlikely that
this may have reacted upon his most famous pupil, for
Osier either had a native aversion to, or in some way
acquired the happy gift of avoiding, tvhat his first preceptor
seemed destined to fall into — controversies. And in the
end, as Dr. Garrison says :

What made him, in a very real sense, the ideal physician, tlie essen-
tial humanist of modern medicine, was his wonderful genius foi
friendship toward all and sundry ; and, consequent upon this trait,
his large, cosmopolitan spirit, his power of composing disputes and
differences, of making peace upon the high places, of bringing about
‘ Unity, Peace and Concord ’ among his professional colleagues.
‘ Wherever Osier went ’, says one of his best pupils, ‘ the charm of
his personality brought men together ; for the good in all men he
saw, and as friends of Osier, all men met in peace.’ ^

But Johnson need have had little worry for his young
friend’s spiritual welfare at this time, nor lest Taylor’s
‘ Holy Living ’ be not read like the ‘ Religio Medici ’, a few
lines a day. For during his medical-school period he was
a regular attendant at early service at the then little Chapel
of St. John the Evangelist near where he lived, and it was
not until several years later that he became a casual church-
goer.^ One would be interested to know the tenor of his

^ From the Foreword in ‘ A Physician’s Anthology of English and American
Poetry’. Oxford University Press, 1920. Selectedand auanged by Casey A.
Wood and Fielding H. Garrison.

® His copy of ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’ is preserved. On the
fly-leaf he has written ‘ W . OsUf, Easter xS'ji and below there follows
‘ Roly Trinity Toronto. St. John the Evangelists Montreal. All Saints,
Margaret^ Street, London.* All Saints is near Portland Place, and while in
Liondon in 1872—4 he and Arthur Browne hved not far away in Gower
Street. The Rev. Arthur French has sent this note of Osier’s relation to
St. John’s during his student days :

This little church round the corner ” was greatly valued by many
of the Montreal medical men at that time ; it was not only situated near

Act. 21 His Spiritual Welfare 75

Christmas letter to Johnson which brought forth ‘this
reply :

From W. A. Johnson to W, 0 . The Parsonage, Weston, Ont.

25 Decbr 1870.

My dear Osier, — Your very aflectionate and thoughtful gift and
letter are both at hand. The Photo, is very good, and I am delighted
to have it. Montreal has surely agreed with you. I could not ask
a greater treat than such a work as ‘ Preparation for Death ’ by
Alfonso, Bp, of Agatha. The subject is one of all others that I like
best : really believing as I do that, ^ better is the day of a man’s
death, than the day of his birth ’, and it is divided into short medita-
tions just suited to my time early in the morning, when I can generally
make 1/2 of an hour before I go down to Chapel. Talking of the
Chapel almost everyone feels it is a success. One thing seems
pretty clear, that almost any thing would be admitted now in the
way of adornment. The cross stands out or peeps through at every
arch and every window and we had two vases of flowers on the altar
tonight and up at the Church the girls have made crosses between

the old Medical School on Cot^ Street, and very near the General Hospital,
but It was under the spiritual direction of the Rev Edmund Wood, nephew
of Aston Key the once well-known surgeon at Guy’s Mr. Wood had won
the aflectionate regard of the medical faculty generally, and of the students,
by his faithful ministrations to the patients in the hospital, and to the poor
who were numerous in the district where the medical students then lived.

‘ The periods of the lenten season and of the final medical examinations
often synchronized, as it did in, I think, the year in which Sir William took
his medical degree and greatly distinguished himself. The pressure on the
time of this industrious and methodical student did not lessen his regular
attendance at the daily service, even at the time, so important to him, of
his examination.

^ Though with succeeding years there was modification of the manner of
showing his appreciation and attachment to ‘‘ the practice of religion ”,
there were throughout his life signs, though latent, that it always existed.
He not only was a personal supporter for a considerable time of the work
of St. John’s, but to the last it was his custom, m many of his frequent
visits to Montreal in later years, to call upon his friend and rector, Mr. Wood.
His last visit to him was shortly before the latter’s death and was marked
by Sir William’s suggestion that he should collect a fund, among former
colleagues, to erect a memorial in the church to Dr. Wright. The latter
had been Professor of Materia Medica at McGill, in both the student and
professional days of Sir William, and also subsequently being ordained,
joined the staff of clergy of the church. Notwithstanding the death of
Mr. Wood, the memorial was erected and stands to-day not only as a mark
of appreciation of one who was both his instructor and colleague, but also
of the attachment Sir William had to his old friend and rector, Mr. Wood, and
also to the church which as a student he was accustomed regularly to attend.’

y 6 The McGill Medical Student Spring 1871

each^ wiadow and even unhappy Couion begins to fancy he can
permit them and still worship.^ These little things are an advance
to a certain extent, but still it is humiliating to see how little we
accomplish. Surely one might expect that at this season of Advent
a few would try to examine their ways and seek counsel and advice
at the mouth of God’s ambassadors. Among the papists there
seems to be a general waking up during advent. In the city and here
they are thronging daily to confession before Xmas. Possibly they
may err greatly in this, but do not we err m totally neglecting it ?
... I am glad you saw Prof^ Dawson. You know all I have of the
Polyzoa and anything you want I w^iil gladly draw write or send.
Profr Hincks hopes to give me the name of that (larva ?) with such
beautiful tentacles. Shew it to Prof Dawson and see if he knows
anything of it. Hoping you may live to be blessed in fulfilling all
your hopes and expectations believe me very affectionately yours

W. A. Johnson.

These ^ hopes and expectations ’ of which he was writing
to Johnson must have concerned an elaboration of his
entozoan collection, for preserved with Johnson’s epistle is
a fragment in Osier’s hand, evidently the first draft of
a letter to some authority recommended by Principal
Dawson. For he says under the date ^ Jan’y 4th 1871 ’ :

I have been engaged for a short time in the study of entozoa and
find great difficulty in getting the species described. On consulting
Prof. Dawson as to who would be the most likely person to aid me,
he referred me to you. I subjoin a list of those I have met with and
the creatures in which they are found ; hoping you will be able to
either name them or refer me to papers in which they have been
described, etc,

J. W. (later Sir William) Dawson, F.R.S., at this time
Principal of McGill, was largely responsible, with the
financial backing of Sir William Macdonald, for the building
up of a real university out of what before 1 870 had been
little more than a flourishing medical department. Primarily
a geologist and a follower of Lyell, he was much interested
in the theory of evolution, about which he had his own
ideas : ‘ The egg grows into the animal and the organism
produces the egg again. This is revolution, not evolution.’
But he was not only Principal : he held the Chair of Botany

^ Johnson’s efforts to adorn his chancel with the customary symbols of
the Christian belief had been regarded as popish if not idolatrous by many
of lus parishioners, who on more than one occasion had broken into the
church and demolished them.

Aet. 21

Making his Mark 77

and Zoology, subjects covered in the primary medical
courses, and was at the same time President of the Montreal
Natural History Society before which Osier’s paper on the
Canadian Diatomaceae had been presented on October 31st
of 1870. This may have served to draw his favourable
attention to the young medical student who had come up
from Toronto for his final clinical years ; and that he w'as
duly impressed will appear from a later episode. Osier,
indeed, had already begun to make his mark in the school,
and though doubtless a prejudiced witness, his cousin
Jennette writes in January to his mother : ‘ Willie has shed
the light of his countenance upon us this evening. I cannot
tell you what a pleasure it is to us to have the dear, merry
fellow coming in and out and to look forward to our Sunday
treat. We hear his praises on all sides and from those whose
good opinion is hard to win and well worth having. He is
pronounced “ thoroughly reliable ”, “ as good as he is
clever ”, “ the most promising student of the year ”, and
finally from a learned professor, slow to praise, “ a splendid
fellow

Despite his prescribed hospital ‘ clerking ’ referred to as
‘ a serious business ’, Osier not only found time for some
outside reading, but as the interview with Principal Dawson
show^ed, was still engaged with his entozoan collection.
Specimens were obtained from many sources, as his notes
indicate — from the Montreal fish-market, from the Natural
History Society through W'hom he secures a dead lynx for
study; ‘8/3/71. From a rat at Montreal General Hospital
I obtained 5 Taeniae from low down in intestine — a small
fine species with motor-vascular system very distinct ’, etc.,
etc. Certainly not the usual pursuits of a medical student
of the ’70’s. Whether he never heard from the parasito-
logist to whom he wrote early in the year, or whether he
became so engrossed in the clinical studies, to be his life’s
chief interest, that his further pursuit of entozoa was
necessarily side-tracked, is impossible to tell. For one
reason or another he never worked up his collection of
specimens for publication, though he always retained a live
interest in the subject.^

^ His early studies had possibly been stimulated by Casimir Davaine’s
book (i860) on ‘Entozoa in Man and Animals’, or more probably by

The McGill Medical Student June 1871

Occupied as he had been with these extra-curricular
studies, the brief Franco-Prussian War of the preceding
months, now coming to a settlement, does not appear to
have touched very deeply if at all the young student whose
medical career spanned the two great European wars of
his generation, in the last of which the heart-breaking
tragedy of his life was to occur. In the family letters of
this time sent to the Cornwall relatives there are, to be sure,
occasional references to ‘ the horrors of war raging but
home news is of greatest interest, and of her son’s progress
Ellen Osier writes : ‘ I will send one of Willie’s photos as
soon as I can get them from Montreal where he is going
on in a very satisfactory manner a great favourite with
every one, with the leading medical men especially, so
I ought to be thankful, indeed I have been very lovingly
dealt with in every way all the past years of my life, and
only wish I had a more grateful heart.’

Word had come early in the year, that Bovell had decided
to take Holy Orders in the West Indies (this despite the
rumour that he was one of the organizers of the new
Trinity College Medical School just projected), and two
days after his ordination, it being Johnson’s birthday, he
sends this letter which Johnson evidently forwarded to
Osier, among whose very scant residue of old letters it has
been found :

Rev. W. A. Johnson from Janies Bovell. Clare-Hall, St. John’s,

Antigua, W. I.

June 27th 1871.

My dear Johnson, — As you may fancy my thoughts to-day went
by telegraph to Weston, and I am spending a deal of time in the
old arm chair with you. The worst part of the business is, that
although you are visible to me, you are as dumb and silent as ghosts
who come to earth. The paper cutter is in your hand and the
Church Times is being opened and you are grumbling about Bennett

Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s ‘ Entozoa ’ (1864). He probably did not know
Rudolph Leuckart’s ‘Die Parasiten’, recently translated (1867), though it
was with Leuckart that he subsequently studied in Leipzig. Chiefly through
his active support a special course in parasitology was given to the Johns
Hopkins students during his period there, and years later he was instru-
mental in securing for McGill a professorship in Parasitology whose first
incumbent was Dr John Todd.

Aet. 21 Bovell Enters the Church 79

and Purchas, but hang it all you wont converse. Well then I will
come back from reverie to earth and take to writing. Here I am in
the good Bishops house ; over an examination and waiting to go
down to Nevis to take up, as Rector, the United Parishes of St George
and St John. It seems very wonderful, very mysterious. . . . On
Saturday the 25th in the Cathedral I was called to the holy order
of Priest and now here I am flesh and blood set to do God’s work.
The time is short and there is a deal to do, but having stood so long
in the Market Place idle and no man having hired me, now that
I have found a Master let me go in too for the [illegible]. The Work
is very severe and the area comparatively large and populous but
still I can do a great deal. I intend to keep up my four services
those on Sunday and on Wednesdays and Fridays ; and I have just
got our school going with 115 children. In St John’s Parish, I have
been bundling out a Three-decker and Kitchen Table, and have
got in a neat Chancel, proper altar. Lectern Prayer desk and 10 new
sittings round the Chancel. By degrees things will go well. I wish
you would send me the address of the man who sent you the paper
for the Church. I want to get as much as will do the Chancel Walls
of both Churches. How I wish I was near you now. I dont despair.
Some day when I have set the two old decayed parishes up and
made the work easy, I will run back to the old place and end my
days in the snow. ... I am trying to get you a collection of ferns
which I hope to find an opportunity of sending through Halifax.
I have not looked at an object since I left Toronto, and I dare not
even think for five Minutes of any work that is past. We wont talk
about it. I long to hear from the Provost for he does give one such
good advice and useful hints. . . . Now my reading for examinations
is over I will have more leisure for writing and dear Osier shall have
a scrawl. Tell Jim I will send him a letter about the Medical Books.
Osier can help him select them. Love for all. Farewell old fellow.

Yr affect

J. Bovell.

One of the few of Osier’s early letters which have come
to light dates from this period. That there are not more
of them is lamentable, in spite of his sharing the strong
family characteristic of reticence regarding his personal
doings. It makes clear that even in his youth words so
ran from his pen that it was left for others to dot the i’s
and cross the t’s for him :

To his sister Charlotte from W, 0 . Montreal, July 6th [1871].

My dear Chattie, First and foremost you may mention casually
that though I am too proud to beg too honest to steal ’ yet I shall
be reduced to one or other remedy before long unless a check arrive

Aet. 22 Formation of Life-habits 8 r

according to his own statement in one of his later lay
sermons/ and it was at this time that he came into par-
ticularly filial relationship with Palmer Howard, whose
library was put at his disposal. He was probably clerking
in the General Hospital, and attending the post-mortem
examinations there, and he confesses that ‘ much worried
as to the future, partly about the final examination, partly
as to what I should do afterwards, I picked up a volume of
Carlyle . . and in it read the familiar sentence, ‘ Our
main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance
but to do what lies clearly at hand ’ — the conscious starting-
point of a habit that enabled him to utilize to the full the
single talent with which he often said he had been entrusted.
It was, in his estimation, one of the two trifling circum-
stances by which his life had been influenced, the first
having been the paragraph in ‘ Father ’ Johnson’s circular
of announcement stating that boys would learn to sing and
dance vocal and pedal accomplishments ’ for which he
was never designed) — a paragraph which diverted him to
Johnson’s school in Weston. The other trifling circum-
stance was the line from Carlyle. Thirty years later in an
impromptu talk ^ to the students of the Albany Medical
College, he is reported to have said :

I started in life — I may as well own up and admit — with just an
ordinary everyday stock of brains. In my schooldays I was much
more bent upon mischief than upon books — I say it with regret
now — but as soon as I got interested in medicine I had only a single
idea and I do believe that if I have had any measure of success at
all, it has been solely because of doing the day’s work that was before
me just as faithfully and honestly and energetically as was in my
power.

How he found time to acquire his familiarity with general
literature has always been a source of mystery to Osier’s
many friends. Probably it was at this early period that he
began his life-long habit of a half-hour’s reading in bed
before putting out his light. Most medical students, alas,
are too engrossed with their work for such literary pursuits,
desirable though they may be. But he never ceased to

^ ‘A Way of Life.’ An address to Yale students, 1913.

^ Delivered Feb. i, 1899. Cf, The Albany Medical Annals^ June 1899,
XX. 307-9.

82

The McGill Medical Student Oct. 1871

encourage the habit, and the books he recommended ^ as
a student’s bedside library in all likelihood represent those
with which he himself became acquainted in this w'ay.

Until 1870 the McGill Medical School had been run on
a proprietary basis, and the teaching was almost entirely in
lecture form and given by general practitioners. The Chair
of Materia Medica, for example, fully stuffed with time-
honoured drugs, was occupied by William Wright, who
incidentally had considerable repute as a surgeon, and
subsequently became a preacher. Robert Craik held the
Chair in Chemistry and later became the Dean of the
Faculty. Lectures on the Institutes of Medicine, which
comprised what is now recognized as physiology and
pathology, were given by William Fraser, a graduate of
Glasgow, though there was no semblance of a laboratory
until Osier himself in 1875 succeeded to the chair. A bluff
Englishman named William Scott was Professor of Anatomy,
who rarely if ever was known to enter the dissecting-room,
this disagreeable duty being left to his demonstrator ; and
the material is said to have been obtained from convenient
cemeteries by the French students, who thereby paid their
school fees. All this, which resembled the Edinburgh
programme of an earlier day, was soon to be revolutionized
by Francis J. Shepherd, one of Osier’s contemporaries and
intimates.^ Indeed, as will be seen, there were a number
of youngsters among the students of the day, who in the
course of a few years were destined to take over and instil
a modern spirit into the pre-clinical years of the old school.
Of the clinical teachers whom Osier came under, there was
Duncan MacCallum in midwifery, who leaned heavily, in
his meticulous lectures, on the traditions of the Dublin
Rotunda, but otherwise was chiefly occupied with a lucrative
practice, so that the senior students were largely left to
their own resources at the Lying-in Hospital. Another
was George W. Campbell, Dean of the Faculty and Pro-
fessor of Surgery, a vigorous and confident operator trained

‘ A Bedside Library for Medical Students.’ Appended to ‘ Aequani-
mitas and other Addresses’. 1904.

2 Cf. Dr._ Shepherd’s privately printed ‘ Reminiscences of Student Days
and Dissecting Room . Montreal, 19^9 i written at Osier’s solicitation.

Aet. 22

The McGill Faculty 83

in pre-antiseptic days, for Lister at this time was little
more than a rumour in Canada, if even that, and the
surgeon of the day operated in his ordinary clothes, collar,
cuffs and all, the more particular ones, indeed, in a frock-
coat. There was a short course, too, in medical juris-
prudence, and the clinics at the old General Hospital were
conducted by George E. Fenwick in surgery and J. Morley
Drake in medicine. Fenwick was a bold operator of pre-
Listerian type, his house surgeons at the time being
George Ross and Thomas G. Roddick, of whom more will
subsequently be heard ; and Roddick a few years later
brought back from Edinburgh the ‘ Lister ritual ’ which
was to transform surgery. J. Morley Drake soon succeeded
Professor Fraser in the so-called Institutes of Medicine,
though he gave up the post two years later, when it became
filled by a new type chosen from the younger generation.

But the member of this faculty to whom Osier was
chiefly indebted was R. Palmer Howard — a courtly gentle-
man, scholarly, industrious, stimulating as a teacher ; and
though the students of the day felt that he was devoid of
humour, he nevertheless was popular with them, and even
at this time was one of the chief figures in the school of
which in 1882 he became Dean. Like his colleagues he,
too, was a general practitioner of surgery as well as physic,
but where he perhaps differed chiefly from them was
through his interest in morbid anatomy, an interest with
which he succeeded in inoculating some of his pupils. In
a later address Osier gave this picture of him :

In my early days I came under the influence of an ideal student-
teacher, the late Palmer Howard of Montreal. If you ask what
manner of man he was, read Matthew Arnold’s noble tribute to his
father in his well-known poem, ‘ Rugby Chapel ’. When young,
Dr. Howard had chosen a path — ‘ path to a clear-purposed goal ’ —
and he pursued it with unswerving devotion. With him the study
and the teaching of medicine were an absorbing passion, the ardour
of which neither the incessant and ever-increasing demands upon
his time nor the growing years could quench. When I first, as
a senior student, came into intimate contact with him in the summer
of 1871, the problem of tuberculosis was under discussion, stirred up
by the epoch-making work of Villemin and the radical views of
Niemeyer. Every lung lesion at the Montreal General Hospital had

84 The McGill Medical Student Spring 1872

to be sbown to him, and I got mj first-hand introduction to Laennec,
to Graves, and to Stokes, and became familiar with their works.
No matter what the hour, and it usually was after 10 p.m., I w^as
welcome with my bag, and if Wilks and Moxon, Virchow or Rokitanski
gave us no help, there were the Transactions of the Pathological
Society and the big Dictionnaire of.Dechambre. An ideal teacher
because a student, ever alert to the new problems, an indomitable
energy enabled him in the midst of an exacting practice to maintain
an ardent enthusiasm, still to keep bright the fires which he had
lighted in his youth. Since those days I have seen many teachers,
and have had many colleagues, but I have nevei known one in whom
was more happily combined a stern sense of duty with the ntental
freshness of youth. ^

It has been said that the school borrowed its traditions
largely from Edinburgh. These were a mixture of work
and hilarity, and though there were no rival political
parties such as Edinburgh sees engaged in active warfare
in connexion with its rectorial elections, there was gaiety
enough, and what were in the day called ‘ footing sprees ’
were bibulous affairs, for the expense of which the seniors
were privileged to tax the freshmen. The annual ‘ F ounders’
Festival ’ was another occasion in which the students took
untold liberties with their seniors and played practical jokes
of a kind it has long been the tradition of unbridled students
the world over to play. Though at the time he was a
‘ teetotaller ’, Osier doubtless entered into all these pranks
with as much spirit as any, for there are certain dispositions
which do not require any adventitious stimulus to enliven
them. But though among the gayest when occasion
offered, better than most young men he had learned to
conserve his time, and though not a gold-medallist of his
class he received at the end of the term an honourable
mention of unusual sort. The prizes announced at the
annual convocation of 1872 were as follows :

(1) ^ The Holmes Gold Medal awarded to the graduate receiving
the highest aggregate number of marks for all examinations, including
primary, final and thesis. [Awarded to Hamilton Allen.]

(2) A prize in Books, for the best examination — written and oral,
in the Final branches. The Gold Medallist is not permitted to
compete for this prize, [Awarded to George A. Stark.]

1 ‘ The Student Life ’ 1905. Cf. ‘ Aequammitas and other Addresses ’

Aet. 22 A Graduation Prize Thesis B 5

(3) A prize in Books, for the best examination written and oral,
in the Primary branches. [Awarded to Francis J. Shepherd.]

(4) The Faculty has in addition this session awarded a special prize
to the Thesis of William Osier, Dundas, O., which was greatly dis-
tinguished for originality and research, and was accompanied by
33 microscopic and other preparations of morbid structure, kindly
presented by the author to the museum of the Faculty.

The gentlemen in order of merit who deserve mention : — In the
Final examination, Messrs. Osier, Browne, Waugh, Marceau, Hebert,
Pegg, St. John, and Morrison. In the Primary examination, Messrs.
Alguire, Hill, Carmichael, McConnel, Ward, Kitson and Osier.

Osier’s thesis was never published, and only a fragment
of it remains — the introduction, couched in rather flowery
and figurative language. As it is one of his youthful pro-
ductions, and his first essay in studies from the pathological
laboratory where he was to spend so many years, a paragraph
or two may be quoted, misspelling and all :

In that Trinity of being — of body mind and soul — which so
maivellously make up the Man, each one has its own special ills and
diseases. With the first of these — the body — have we here anything
to do, leaving the second to be attended to by that class of men
whose duty it is, ‘ to minister to minds diseased \ i. e. the Psycolo-
gists, while those of the third class beyond a Physician’s skill seek
aid elsewhere. Few indeed are peimitted to end their days in
a natural manner, by a gradual decline of the vital powers, tiU that
point reached, where nutrition failing to supply the fuel, necessary
to keep the lamp of life alight, leaves decay to drag back the fabric
to the dust. . . . The number of avenues through which death may
leach us, the natural fraility of our bodies the delicate and intricate
machinery which maintains us in a condition of health may well
make us exclaim with the Poet

Strange that a harp of thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long.

To investigate the causes of death, to examine carefully the con-
dition of organs, after such changes have gone on in them as to render
existence impossible and to apply such Knowledge to the preven-
tion andtieatment of disease, is one of the highest objects of the
Physician. . . .

CHAPTER V

1872-4

STUDENT DAYS ABROAD

A VOLUMINOUS letter from ‘ Father ’ Johnson addressed
to Osier in Dundas after his graduation, indicates that his
departure for a period of study abroad — the natural goal
of every newly-fledged Canadian M.D. — was impending.
Johnson lamented that he was tied down and would be
unable to meet him in Toronto to see about Boveli’s
microscope,^ and enclosed ‘ a copy of Devout Life for your
dear Sister God bless and protect her Canon Osier
could scarcely have afforded to send a son to Europe for
the proposed two years’ absence, even though the elder
children were by this time married and living away from
home. But one of his sons came to the rescue, for Edmund,
who was engaged to a Scotch lady, a Miss Cochran of
Balfour, was on the point of paying a timely visit to his
future relations and was glad to have the lively companion-
ship of his younger brother — ^indeed furnished the $1,000
necessary to see him through his prolonged stay.

They sailed on one of the Allan Line steamers, on
July 3rd, and landing in the north of Ireland visited the
Giant’s Causeway and the Lakes of Killarney. From there
W. 0 . must have gone on to London, for in a pocket note-
book of the period is written : ‘ William OsUr, M.D.
London July i8y2. Cash Account. Be frugal : fay as
you go.’ It seems to have been one of the few periods of
his life in which he kept an account of his expenditures,
and cab fares and tips and tea are all duly recorded. In
later years after beginning his consulting practice he
methodically entered all items of his professional income in
a small account-book for physicians such as are put out

^ The Rev. James Bovell Johnson, writes that ‘ when Boveli’s personal
belongings were sold in Toronto I can remember being with Osier at the
sale, and Osier then bought-in certain family treasures for Mrs. Barwick,
Bovell’s daughter, then living in Toronto ’.

Aet. 23 First Visit to Great Britain 87

each year by some of the various medical publishers.^ ’The
items, to be sure, for many years were few and far between,
but after this first sojourn abroad he apparently kept no
record of his outgoings, and was in consequence continually,
hard up. Like Bovell he responded to every appeal, indeed
often before the appeal was made, with a generosity which
was apt to be beyond his means. It was not until August
that he rejoined his brother in the Highlands, as told in the
following letter — one of the few home letters which escaped
a subsequent conflagration :

From W, 0 . to his mother. Balfour, Aug 14th [1B72].

My dear Mother, Up here in this far north region, I had for-
gotten the distance from Liverpool and so let Canadian mail day
pass, this however will reach you via New York. Since I last wrote,

I have visited many new places & met many new people. I left
London on Thursday evening for Edinboro’ by the London & North
Western via Carlisle. I was fortunate in having a nice travelling
companion and one who knew something of old friends ; it was
a gentleman from the West Indies who knew Dr. Bovell intimately
& had seen him within the last few months. He gave a very nice
account of him and his doings which naturally interested me very
much. I managed to sleep pretty fairly, though not as I would have
in a Pullman. We arrived in Edinboro at 9.30 a.m. on Friday
morning, too late to take the through train to Aberdeen so that left
me four hours to examine the city. I was much struck with its
beauty ; it exceeds anything in cities I have yet seen. I found out
young Grasett (of Toronto) who is studying medicine at the Uni-
versity, and under his guidance did the wards of the Royal Infirmary
(the chief hospital of the city) a queer rambling old place, as you
may imagine as it was built in the beginning of last century. ... At
Aberdeen I was met by Mr. Alex. Cochran who took me to his house,
where I slept that night. In the morning I had a few hours to spy
out the ^ Granite City’. It is very regularly built, somewhat too
uniform but has a delightful cleanliness about it which to a Londoner
like myself was very refreshing. I left at noon for Glenninan, Mr.
D. R. Smith’s place, where Edmund was staying ; it is a nice spot
& he has recently rebuilt his house, in grand style. Both he and
his wife seem very delicate, but probably his trip to Canada with
Edmund wiU do him good. In the evening we went on to Balfour,

^ These account-books from 1872 to 1919 have all been carefully pre-
served and Osier had them rebound. He evidently felt that the professional
income of a consultant in his position and of his day might some time be
a matter of historical interest.

88 Student Days Abroad Aug -Sept. 1872

the Cochrans’ place, and there received a hearty welcome. The
trip up the Deeside as far as Aboyne is very lovely, but up towards
Balmoral it is still more so. I will have to postpone the account of
my journey to the Abeideen Highlands as I wish this to catch the
Friday mail via New York. We go down to Edinboro again and
from thence to Glasgow and the Western Highlands, but more of all
this by the Cunard. I hope all are well. Much love.

Yours in haste,

Willie.

One incident of the hearty Scotch welcome has been
gathered from other sources, indicative of his teetotalism as
a young man : for Mrs. Cochran is said to have remarked
to her prospective son-in-law that it was sad one so young
as his brother should have to refrain. Otherwise there is
scant record of this sojourn in the Highlands, which in
after years he came to know so well, though in one of his
later addresses ^ he refers to the visit in Glasgow w^here he
first met Joseph Coats the pathologist and Sir William
Macewen. In another place also ^ he gave a brief summary
of the professional occurrences of the next year or more :

In the summer of 1872 after a short Ruridieise^ Dublin, Glasgow
and Edinburgh, I settled at the Physiology Laboratory, University
College, with Professor Burdon Sanderson, where I spent about
fifteen months working at histology and physiology. At the hospital
across the way I saw in full swing the admirable English system,
with the ward work done by the student himself the essential feature.
I was not a regular student of the hospital, but through the kind
introduction of Dr. Burdon Sanderson and of Dr. Charlton Bastian,
an old family friend, I had many opportunities of seeing Jenner and
Wilson Fox, and my note-books contain many precepts of these
model clinicians. From Ringer, Bastian and Tilbury Fox, I learned
too, how attractive out-patient teaching could be made. Ringer
I always felt missed his generation, and suffered from living in
advance of it.

From W, 0 . to his sister Charlotte {now Mrs, Gzoyii). Sept. 24th.

My dear Elizabeth, I dated this letter last night, and had I gone
on with it would have given you all a good wigging, most unjustly,
for I thought the Canadian mail had been delivered & there were
no letters. However, in the morning on going to the Hospital

^ ‘ The Pathological Institute of a General Hospital.’ Glasgoto Medical
Journal^ Nov. 1911, lxx\a. 321.

^ At St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Dec. 1913 : cf. ‘ The Medical Cimic .
a Retrospect and a Forecast.’ British Medical Journal^ Jan. 3, 1914.

Aet. 23 Bovell Recommends India 89

I received yours of the — I don’t know. Why can’t you date your
letters? — and Jennette’s of the 8th Sept, which amply made up for
the brevity of yours. The man at the letter box always has such
a knowing smirk on his face when he hands me my letters on a
Wednesday morning, the looney must think they come from my
girl, whoever she may be. I am sure that any one reading yours
& Jennette’s letters of this morning might suppose that they came
from Utah and I was a young Mormon in embryo, so feelingly do
each of you allude to two separate girls as mine. ... We have had it
wretchedly cold for the last week and several typical London days
have been interspersed. I went to the Harrisons’ one day last week
and. after dinner accompanied them to Mr. West’s church which is
rapidly being repaired after the fire. On Sunday I took a trip out
to Putney to dine at Atwell Francis’s. I got there early and went
to St, John’s Church, moderately high and very well filled. The
Francises do not trouble Church much, I do not think it runs in
the family. Mrs. Francis is very pleasant and they have a brace of
fine boys. I went with Atwell in the afternoon to Kew and pulled
down the river in the evening over the course of the Intervarsity
boat-race. Next Sunday I shall probably go to the Boyds’ [family
friends in England who used to send missionary boxes to Bond Head,
and one of whom he was subsequently to meet in Oxford days] and
take with me your wedding cake as an introduction to the sisters. . . .
They had a grand commemoration service at All Saints Lambeth on
the Anniversary of the S.P.U.C. (I am afraid those initials are
incorrect, it is the Christian Unity Society). I did not go, but
regretted it after reading the description. The Williamsons I sup-
pose are just now in the agony of moving as I saw in the Banner
that the sale was to take place on the 20th. Edmund by this time
has been with you or ought to have been. Love to Mother & all
the Rectory folk. Yours affectionately,

Willie.

As is characteristic, he says very little about his own
plans for the future, though others are concerned about
them, as this letter from the West Indies indicates :

From James Bovell to W. 0 . The Farm, St. John’s, Nevis,

Sept. 27th, 1872.

My dear Boy, — I have no one whom I love better than yourself,
and altho’ I have been caieless in writing it has been caused by my
hard work and ever increasing trouble. However I need not burden
you with my griefs, which my sisters will tell you of when you call
on them. Find them at 193 Hampstead Road, Regents Park, N.W.,
tell them I asked you to call to introduce you to Stuart. I more
than rejoice at your success and if you will only go on as you have
been doing the end is clear. I am at a loss what to say about youi

Student Days Abroad Aug.~Sept. 1872

settlement. I still cling to the notion of India as I know that no
such field for fortune and fame is open to man elsewhere. Canada
for some time to come must be lixnited in resources sufficiently
remunerative, whereas India with its teeming population and
immense wealth in Native Princes and Merchants affords all a pro-
fessional man can desire. The Church here is in an awful state, it
is being disestablished and disendowed and the negroid life is a very
sorry one to work upon. Methodism has eaten Christianity out of
them and in place of it they have an emotional system which employs
the phrases and language of Christians which is entirely void of life
or principle.

I would give anything if Johnson could be induced to come here,
there is a vacant Parish, £130 sure for a time and ;£i30 more, easily
made up Of course with a good but Z^?^-chlIrch Bishop we caffit
have Vestments but I take care to have all I can in order. I have
just finished a reredos the centre panel of which has a Cross 18 inches
high. The new altar is quite correct and allho’ I am not permitted
to stand in the middle front, I do for primary consecration stand at
the North W. corner, but kneel in front at receiving, and saying the
service. I have sent home to my sister a Manuscript of all Hookei
has said on the Eucharist. It is now lawful so I think if it was pub-
lished separately it would do good. He is plain. ... I will write next
Mail, — Post time up. Yrs. ever

J. BoViiLL.

The project of taking up his work in India, where in
Bovell’s estimation was offered the greatest ‘ field for
fortune and fame ^ was evidently very seriously considered
at this time, and apparently roused some consternation
among his relatives and friends at home, for it was not
until early in the following year that he wrote to his cousin
Jennette to quiet her soul about his India schemes. Whether
there was any influence other than the advice of Bovell is
not apparent, but the India Medical Service had always
attracted a goodly number of the very best of the British
medical students, and it was well known that it was a corps
with the highest esprit^ and that the opportunities for work
as well as for ^ fortune and fame ’ were great. Many years
later in an address before the members of the first graduat-
ing class of the newly established Army Medical School in
Washington,^ he said : ^ As I write, an inspiration of the
past occurs, bringing me, it seems, closer to you than any
of the points just mentioned, a recollection of the days
^ ‘ The Army Surgeon.’ Feb. 28, 1894.

Aet. 23 Ophthalmological Aspirations 91

when the desire of my life was to enter the India Medical
Service, a dream of youth, dim now and almost forgotten
— a dream of “ Vishnu land, what Avatar ! ” ’ But this
was a short-lived aspiration, for he appears to have set his
heart on a career in ophthalmology. Various reasons must
have led him to this decision, and it was undoubtedly
a bitter disappointment when the project was finally
relinquished. Specialization in medicine was just coming
to the fore, and in Montreal as yet there was no one who
limited his work to the diseases of the eye. Realizing that
in the absence of financial backing, and with existing con-
ditions of medicine in Canada, he would have to enter
practice for a living, he decided upon a speciality which
would permit him in his spare hours to pursue science
rather than to have practice pursue him, as would be the
case were he to succeed as a general practitioner. More-
over, he was evidently influenced by the career of the
most eminent eye-specialist of the day, who though chiefly
identified with the Royal Ophthalmic Hospital at Moor-
fields, had formerly been Professor of Ophthalmology at
King’s College. His deep admiration for Bowman as the
type of man who, because of a thorough grounding in
science, could subsequently rise high in a speciality, was
expressed years later in an address to a body of specialists
in another field.^ But Bowman still retained his enthusiasm
for physiology, and he advised the young man, whatever he
was to do in the future, to begin by a period of work at
University College Hospital ^ with John Burdon Sanderson.
The advice was taken, and a profitable and happy seven-
teen months was passed in Sanderson’s laboratory. It was
a curious trick of fortune that he should have come to
work under the man whom thirty-four years later he was
destined to succeed as Regius Professor of Medicine at
Oxford.

^ ‘ Remarks on Specialism ’ Archives of Pediatrics, Phila , 1892, ix 481.

* University College was born in 1828 of an effort to establish wbat was
to be a non-sectarian University in London, a project which was thwarted
by the establishment of a rival institution, King’s College, backed by the
Anglican Church, which was jealous of any loss of its hold on national educa-
tion. In consequence of this split the University of London long remained
a name only, and functioned chiefly as an examining board.

g2 Student Days Abroad Oct. 1872

Osier’s laboratory note-book of the time is preserved,^
showing that the course began on October 7th with the
examination of the inflamed anterior chamber of the eye
of a frog and of an inflamed lymph sac experimentally pro-
duced, with subsequent microscopical study of the tissues.
It was actually a course in what to-day we would call
experimental pathology, for physiology and pathology were
not divorced as they have since become, to the harm of
each and to the considerable neglect of their offspring
histology, which concerns the microscopical examination of
the tissues in health and disease. The ’jo’s, as may be
recalled, saw the dawn of a most important period for
medicine, which had awakened with the new learning
relating to the microscopical sources of disease following
upon the cellular doctrine of Virchow, and leading up
to the bacteriological discoveries of Pasteur and Koch, and
the adaptation of them by Lister to surgery.

Interesting as it might be, this is no place to do more
than hint at the story of the gradual separation of structure
and function. Earlier anatomists like the Hunters and
their associates of the Windmill Street School w’ere as much
concerned with the one as the other. But in a progressive
school like that at University College a curious situation
arose, there being one Professor of Anatomy and another Pro-
fessor of Anatomy and Physiology. The subject of anatomy
had become little more than a weary descriptive science, and
remained so until it was revivified in course of time by
Professor His and his pupils. Meanwhile its one-time hand-
maiden physiology was pressing for a separation, and when
this was accomphshed the clever child took with her the
microscope and the finer study of structure, leaving nothing
but the cadaver for anatomy. Thus it came about that
histology, in which lay the chief promise of future reward
from research, has to this day in English schools been part
and parcel of physiology rather than of anatomy.'^ It was

^ ‘ Short Notes on a Course of Practical Physiology by Burdon Sanderson
at University College. London, 1872-3.’

* The Chair t% Anatomy at University College has been held successively
by J. R. Bennett, Richard Quain, G. V. Ellis, and G. D. Thane. The Chair
of Anatomy and Physiology was held first by Jones Quain, then by the famous

Aet. 25 Structure and Function 93

into this situation, with its spirit of revival of physiological
investigation for which Burdon Sanderson, Michael Foster,
Lauder Brunton, and E. Klein were chiefly responsible,
that Osier was introduced, and it was one of which his early
familiarity with the microscope and his growing taste for
experimental pathology particularly qualified him to take
advantage. The situation, too, explains in a measure his
peculiar fitness, despite his youth, for the position offered
him two years later at McGill as Professor of the Institutes
of Medicine, then comprising physiology, histology, and
pathology. Unless perhaps with Cohnheim in Germany,
no more stimulating group could possibly have been found
than those who were at work in the ’70’s in Burdon Sander-
son’s laboratory. Sanderson’s great desire was to make
experimental physiology pre-eminent in the teaching, and
this part of the work he reserved for himself, while to
Edward Schafer, a young man of Osier’s age, was delegated
the practical histology, to T. J. M. Page the teaching of
physiological chemistry, and to Klein, who had come over
from Vienna, was given the histological pathology.

^0 TV. O.fioin R. Palmei Howard, Montreal, 25 Oct. 72.

My dear Osier, — . . .You have by this time well settled down to
yr work in the Metropolis, I doubt not, and are picking up much
that will be useful to you hereafter. Touching your prospects as

William Sharpey whose pupil and successor was Burdon Sanderson, With
this chair there was established a separate Lecturesbvp of Practical Physio-'
logy which was held in turn by Sharpey’s two most distingmshed pupils.
The first of them, Michael Foster, was captured in 1870 for Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he started the modern science movement, Burdon
Sanderson having been appointed to succeed him at University College. This
lectureship was finally changed into a separate Chair of Practical Physiology
and Histology^ and Sanderson, after succeeding Foster, occupied it until
Sharpey’s retirement from the Chair of Anatomy and Physiology, at which
time the Jodrell Chair of Physiology was established to include physiology
and histology. The Jodrell Chair has been occupied in succession by
Burdon Sanderson, by Edward A. Schafer, and byE. H. Starling. Burdon
Sanderson’s withdrawal was in 1882, when he accepted the Waynflete
Professorship of Physiology at Oxford. This appointment was the first
movement towards the revival of what had been termed ‘ the lost School
of Medicine of Oxford’, and it is noteworthy that the proposed grant of
f 10, 000 to build Sanderson a laboratory met with organized opposition on
the part of the antivivisection societies — an opposition which was over-
come at Convocation by the small margin of 188 to 149 votes.

Student Days Abroad Oct. 1872

OcuKst, yoTi will have much more to contend with than we ever
thought of when we spoke together on the subject. In July or
August last Mr. Morgan, resident Surgeon at Moorfields, and
formerly m charge of the eye-wards at Netley, wrote to me informing
me that he purposed coming to Montreal as an Oculist. We had
known each other six years before at Moorfields during a short visit

I made at that time Of course were he to come, it would seriously

affect your hopes as to making eye dis. a speciality. As between you
and Dr. BuUer I may safely say, you would have the countenance
and support of your old teachers. But here the plot thickens. . . .

And Howard went on at length to say that there were
indeed three candidates in the Montreal field with better
chances than Osier, so that his advice would be to abandon
ophthalmology and ‘ to cultivate the whole field of Med.
and Surg. paying especial attention to practical physiology
which in his opinion was destined to become one of the
most popular departments of medical teaching. He closed
by announcing that Dean Campbell had requested him ‘ to
present an order from Dr. Wright upon Nock, the medical
bookseller for your books — ^which you will select yourself and
have printed upon them : “ Graduation Prize Arvarded to
William Osier, etc.” ’ With Howard’s letter the rough
draft of Osier’s reply has been preserved. It says :

... As you may imagine I w^as not a little disappointed at the
blighting of my prospects as an ophthalmic surgeon, but I accept
the inevitable with a good grace. I spoke to Morgan yesterday and
he tells me as follows : that he purposes going out early in the
spring stopping until August, when he has to return on business,
and then going back if the place suits him. He is a very practical
man and one of great experience, so much so that there is no surgeon
connected w'ith Mooifields who does not listen with deference to
his opinion. He might be younger and in better health, but it is
difficult to procure an aiticle absolutely perfect. I now have to
look forward to a general practice and I confess to you it is not wdth
the greatest amount of pleasure. I had hoped in an ophthalmic
practice to have a considerable amount of time at my disposal, and
a fair return in a shorter time, but in a general practice which will
be much slower to obtain (if it becomes of any size) what ever time
you may have is always liable to be broken in upon. Now Practical
Physiology — setting aside anything like original work — and con-
sidering merely the teaching, requires much time and will need, to
be done properly, some outlay on the part of the College or myself.
The upshot of all this is, that I want something definite stated as

Aet. 23 Blighted Prospects 9 5

regards my futuie connection with. McGill College and I have
written the Dean to that effect. It simply will not pay me to go
on here spending quite half my time working at a subject [physiology]
which may eventually become popular with the students, but the
fees from which in Canada will never alone repay either the outlay
required to qualify myself or the time spent over it. I am sorry to
have to appear so mercenary, but the recollection of my old friend
Dr. Bovell, who tried to work at Physiology and Practice both and
failed in both, is too green in my memoiy to allow me to take any
other course. My ambition is in time to work up a good Laboratory
in connection with the College, and if I get a favourable answei
from Dr. Campbell, with that object in view I will continue my
Physiological studies after this winter, but if not, I must turn my
attention more fully to those branches which will enable me to
engage in a general practice most successfully. ... I am very busy
at present in the Laboratory, spending four or five hours in it every
day. I commenced as a green hand ab imUo^ in order that I might
miss no little details. I have a little private work going on under
Dr. Sanderson’s superintendence connected with the antagonistic
action of Atropin and Physostigmin on the white corpuscles, but
whether it will come to anything or not remains to be seen, however
in any case the practice is helpful. I purpose after Xmas taking
a thorough course in Practical Chemistry on your advice, for of
course that is the basis of many Physiological investigations. I get
some good P.M ’s at Univ. Coll, and the remarks made by some of
the men especially Drs. James Barlow and Ringer are very valuable.
I have made a good many useful friends at Moorfields among the
Surgeons and as they are nearly all connected with General Hospitals
one can go about with less restraint always feeling sure of a personal
welcome. Browne and I are together which makes it very pleasant. . . .

He and Arthur Browne shared a room somewhere in Gower
Street, and there were a number of other young Canadian
students of their acquaintance in London. Zimmerman, who
had entered the T oronto school with him, was at S t . Thomas’s,
and Buller, who ere long returned to Montreal, where he
took up the practice of ophthalmology and rented an upstairs
room to Osier, was now house surgeon at Moorfields.
However great may have been Osier’s disappointment in
regard to his pet project, it was borne in a cheerful spirit,
and the preceding exchange of letters indicates that before
he left Montreal there must have been some movement on
foot to create a position for him in the school. His reply
to Palmer Howard evidently was transmitted to Principal
Dawson, who shortly after made a new proposal : in effect.

c)6 Student Days Abroad Oct. 1872

that he was shortly to retire from the Chair of Botany ;
that a new lectureship was to be created to embrace the
faculties both of Medicine and the Arts ; that the incum-
bent should be proficient in structural and economic botany,
including the use of the microscope ; that botanical science
held out a good chance for scientific reputation, though
from a pecuniary point of view — well, the fees from the
medical classes alone amounted to $200 and might increase.
With Principal Dawson’s letter was enclosed one from Dean
Campbell, which enlarged on the subject as follows :

The enclosed note from Principal Dawson anticipates much of
what I have to state upon the subject. A three months’ course of
Pathology with the use of the Microscope might be added to the
Botany course. It is not compulsory with us, but it is among the
requirements of the Medical Council of Ontario, and I have no
doubt would be well attended. We have the advantage of now being
able to offer you first rate accommodation, probably as good as any
in America, but our chairs are not endow^ed, and the Professor
depends upon his class fees for the remuneration, so that you must
take your chance as all of us have done, and look chiefly to private
practice for a living.

We all as a Faculty will be most happy to have you associated w ith
us, and the fact that we entertain such a high opinion of youi acquire-
ments and character, as to offer you the Chair of Botany, will give
you, a comparative stranger in Montreal, a Great Advantage in
commencing practice. I was most thankful in my early career here, to
obtain such a connection, with precious little in the way of emolument.

I am not authorized to make any definite offer of a separate Chair
of Pathology, at present that branch is included in the Institutes
course, and taught by Dr. Drake, who might or might not be willing
to confine his instructions exclusively to Physiology, I merely speak
of the possibility of such a decision being at some future period
considered advisable. You should certainly devote the chief share
of your attention to Medicine and Surgery. A young married
couple might as reasonably expect to live upon love as a medical
man to live upon pure science in this most practical countiy. Let
me know when you have Maturely considered the subject, whether
you will accept Principal Dawson’s proposal, and qualify yourself to
teach Botany in the way in which he points out, or whether w^e are
to look elsewhere for some one to relieve him from that portion of
his labours. . . .

This proposal was followed in the next mail by a long
and friendly letter from Palmer Howard, who hopes that

Aet. 23

An Offer from McGill

97

he ‘ will feel the College is doing what it can towards
advancing your interests and securing for you some official
connexion with the University and expresses the belief
that Principal Dawson might in time turn over to him not
only the medical but the arts course in Botany as weU, and
some day might also entrust him with Zoology. However,
the university being poor and needy and in no position to
establish lectures in practical physiology at present, he
advises his young friend to qualify himself for general
practice, and if he would ‘ spare the time and money to
run up to Edinbro. for the F.R.C.S. — which will cost only
£5, and coming back here it will do you no harm to have
a diploma from the “ Old Country ” although not in-
trinsically worth more than if fairly obtained here.’

Osier’s replies were frank and straightforward refusals of
the offer, on the grounds of his absolute unfitness for the
position. The rough drafts of his answers to all three of
these letters have been preserved ; it may suffice to quote
one of them :

My dear Dr. Howard, I have written to Dr. Dawson refusing
the kind offer made me of the lectureship in Botany. I am afraid
you will not be pleased at it, but I really can not do otherwise. If
I knew anything of Botany at present ; if I had nothing else left to
do for two or three years it might be thought of ; but as matters
stand now I would only make a fool of myself in accepting such
a position. I would feel far too keenly the anomalous situation of
holding a chair in Botany & knowing absolutely nothing of the
Flora of my native land. I am afraid the offer was made more from
personal feelings than any fitness for the Post. I can assure you
I appreciate highly the compliment paid me & consider that
McGill has more than fulfilled any obligation she may have con-
sidered herself under. I hope nothing was said about it for I should
not like it to come to the ears of my people, they would be vexed
at me, not knowing the ins & outs of the case. I continue my
work at U. C. Laboratory & am satisfied so far with my progress. . . .

It was unquestionably the right decision, though the
offer was one that might easily have tempted a young man
of twenty-three who knew his mind less well. This exchange
of letters has been a chance finding : Osier himself, so far
as is known, never referred to the matter again. It is
a somewhat curious coincidence that this, his first offer,

2923 I

H

98 Student Days Abroad Dec. 1872

was' a post in Botany, and that almost the last position he
accepted, though an honorary one, was the Presidency of
the Botanical Society of the British Isles.

"To his sistei Mrs, Gwynfrom W, 0 . December [1872].

My dear Chattie, Though I wrote you last week I cannot help
writing again and wishing you — though late — ' Many happy returns
of the day Also it will be Christmas time when you get this ; and
it is but brotherly to write and wish you at this the first Christmas
of your married life, both a happy one and a merry New Year.
There goes. I have reversed matters but you must overlook all
mistakes as I have a host of letters this week, one of which already
written, you will blow me up for. The Canadian mail is very late
this week, but we must expect that as the winter comes on. Nothing
much has been going on. I am very busy but shall slacken a little
at Christmas.

Wednesday, I had intended on Sunday to go up and see the
Pellatts^ but Canon Liddon was preaching at St. Pauls and I could
not resist the temptation of hearing him again. He is very long
(i. e, his sermons), nearly an hour ; we did not get out till after five
o’clock. I went to All Saints both morning and evening. As I came
up from church in the morning I went into a very doui looking
edifice about five minutes walk from our lodgings and to my surprise
I found it another High Church. I could not see any name to it,
but I will find out and go there occasionally, Chiist Church, Albany
Street which is almost within a stones throw, is not nearly so high,
no vestments, incense or the like, but I do not want to become
enamoured of those as I will not get them in Montreal nor can
I quite forego the notion that they are not at all orthodox.
[Johnson and Bov ell to the contrary.] To-day has been glorious,
blue sky and no lain. Canadian steamer is telegraphed so that
letters will be at the Hospital in the morning after reading
which I may add a postscript. Much love. Got your letter this
morning. Youis,

Willie.

Meanwhile very little is said of the work which has been
going on since October 7th over the microscope in Burdon
Sanderson’s laboratory, or who were his fellow-workers,
though for a time Francis Darwin had a table near by, and
several times spoke of taking him for a week-end at ^ Down
but did not do so as his father was not well. A letter from
^ Down ’ to W. A. Johnson, telling him of such a meeting in
the old home of the Johnsons, would have been interesting,
to say the least. Sanderson’s course ended on January 24th

Aet. 23 Burdon Sanderson’s Laboratory 99

with an exercise on the physiology of secretion, and Osier’s
last note reads :

On the propriety of using the lower animals for the purpose of
experimentation Dr. Sanderson said ist, we are at liberty to use
them on the same ground as we do for food : 2nd for scientific
investigation are justified in giving pain : 3rd for mere demonstra-
tion we are not justified in giving pain. Hence aU experiments are
omitted which cannot be pei formed on anaesthetized animals A

^0 W, O.fropi W. A, Johnson, The Parsonage, Weston,

Jany 9th 1873.

My dear Osier, — Yours of the 8th Ult® is at hand, & it is the
third you have very kindly and thoughtfully written without an
answer from me. . . . Reasoning on general principles, no doubt
your friend Howard’s advice to devote yourself to general
medicine is good, I can not be expected to even offer an opinion
on a thing I know nothing of. ... I think I was turned from Botany
as a specialty early in life, by some old medical man who lived near
those steps w^ go down from Oxford Street by his saying, ‘ don’t
you think of a specialty until you are forty or some such words.
I really must not write so much on a thing I know nothing about.
Is it likely that the faculty of McGill College can afford to answer
you distinctly in writing, concerning your future position with
them ? I do not see how they can, because you would have a claim
upon them. Peihaps they will ; but if they do, they suiely rate
you very high. It is quite likely they will extend the offer, but not
definitely, & it will be for you to consider what it may lead to
eventually ; provided there is a reasonable remuneration for the
present. If you are obtaining a present remuneration (i. e.) if you
are in a position where you are regularly paid, though it be only
a small amount, look well before you leave it for future increased
salary, or something indefinite ; for one bird in the hand is better
than two in the bush. I am very glad you got comfortably settled
in London. I envy you your Chuich privileges. Do not be afraid
to use them freely & lovingly. Many Churches in London, from
what I hear & read must be doing a good work. I suppose many
of them freely & openly admit every sensible usage of the Roman
Churches without any reference to papal authority, or to the errors
w^ have grown up from it. It is just what I could enjoy, &

^ In the early ’70’s, as may be recalled, the antivivisection controversy
m which Huxley was so actively engaged as protagonist for the scientists,
was the subject of much discussion. It, however, was not until 1876 that
in spite of the protests by Huxley, Darwin, Burdon Sanderson and others,
the drastic act was passed which has so hampered medical research in the
British Isles.

loo Student Days Abroad jan. 1873

seems to me right. A return to the old paths. Tell me all you can
about these matters when you write, but remember dear fellow
I do not expect a letter. . . .

This very long letter contained a deal of excellent advice,
which need not be quoted save for one question Johnson
ashed : ‘ May you not lessen your usefulness and knowdedge
in passing by general information to pursue a specialty? ’
This, too, had been Howard’s suggestion, and accordingly
the next ten months were given over very largely to ‘ walk-
ing the hospitals ’ in the old signification of the term ;
and in doing so he was particularly impressed by Murchison
at St. Thomas’s, and by the clinics given by Sir William
Jenner and Wilson Fox^ at University College. There he
also followed Ringer, as well as H. C. Bastian, who lectured
on nervous diseases though he was chiefly engrossed at the
time by his theories regarding spontaneous generation.
Early in the year he took a course of lectures on embryology
given by E. Klein at the Brown Institution, and must have
been interested, for ‘ James Bovell, M.D., M.R.C.P.’ appears
only once on the pages of a full note-book ; and at this
time he evidently started some experiments on the blood
of guinea-pigs, which, however, do not seem to have come
to much. He even attended surgical operations, for Browne,
his room-mate, who regularly sent medical letters home for
publication in the journals, acknowledges his indebtedness
to Dr. Osier for notes of surgical cases at the University
Hospital, where Mr. Erichsen was then in attendance.
The two friends during this time had been making a des-
perate struggle to master German, but one of them at
least had little gift for speech in foreign tongues, possibly

^ Wilson Fox was not well at the time, and when he died some years
later Osier wrote : ‘ When I look back, through the mist, to 1872-3 and try
to recall specific days and hours, there are few which will return with greater
distinctness than those in which I see Wilson Fox standing at the head of
a bed at University College Hospital, unravelling for the class the com-
plicated symptoms of some chest case. He had a refinement and charm of
manner particularly attractive. Something of the gentle spirit of the great
Friend, whose name he bore, and into whose Society he was born, pervaded
his nature, and there was a kindliness in his manner which won the hearts
alike of student and of patient.’ [In ‘Notes and Comments’, Canada
Medical and Surgical Journal, June 1887, xv. 702-3.]

lOI

Act. 23 Walking the Hospitals

owing to his unmusical ear. They evidently got gre‘ater
satisfaction out of their general reading, and to his much-
loved Arthur Browne ^ himself devoted to English litera-
ture, Osier ascribes his introduction to Lamb and Coleridge.
Together they must have begun to frequent the anti-
quarian book-stands ; and as Osier had the prize money
for his treatise, in the shape of an order for books on S. &
J. Nock of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, he proceeded there,
and in after years recalled the place as ^ an indescribable
clutter of books, whereas the brothers Nock, far advanced
in years, were weird and desiccated specimens of humanity

To Miss Jennette Osier from W. 0 , Januaiy i6th 1873.

... I hope they have sent down my last two or three letters as
they tell of my Xmas visit in Norfolk A I spent a very happy ten
days in spite of a rather severe cold which kept me in doors for
nearly a week. I did not get to church on Xmas day even ; I was
going to say for the first time in my life, but probably my first two
Xmas days were spent in a veiy similar manner, eating & sleeping
foiming the chief part. Books, Music and cats are the chief features
in Wit con vicarage. The former I read, the second I listened to,
& tried to understand, while the third I teased unmercifully.
The girls are accomplished, good musicians, &c., but are lacking in
looks which in spite of all else are very requisite. At Norwich
I visited the Cathedral & saw what I could of the relics of my
favourite Sir T. Browne. His skull & a good painting were in the
Infirmary ; his tomb in the church of St. Peter Mancroft. I could
not resist the temptation of seeing Ely and so stopped there on my
way up. It is a wonderful building, the restoration making it look
almost perfect. I was there for the morning service, forming in
fact with a couple of kids, the congregation. I am very sure that
after a months residence in this moist Isle you would pine for the
land of your adoption. It only needs the fountains of the great
deep ’ to break up and then in many parts the deluge would be
complete. For a few days the rain has ceased, but the clouds only
permit an occasional gleam of sunlight. ... I went to Drury Lane
the other evening & saw the Xmas Pantomime. It w’as very grand
& nice but oh ! so long. I left long before it was over. Napoleon’s
death has caused such a sensation ; he was buried yesterday. I will
try & get a paper with full particulars in it though of course the
news will be stale enough by the time you get this letter. You may
quiet your soul about my India schemes. I shall not go there.
Canada’s my destination. . . . Kisses to all the kids. Yours

Willie.

^ To visit relatives of his new brother-in-kw, Colonel Gwyn.

102

Student Days Abroad jan.-Feb. 1873

This sojourn on the East Coast gave him his first oppor-
tunity to visit Norwich, and while there he was much moved
by the sight of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, which many years
afterwards he was instrumental in having placed in a proper
receptacle. In a later address he thus refers to this visit ;

The tender sympathy with the poor relics of humanity which
Browne expresses so beautifully in these two meditations Urn
Burial ’ and ^ A Letter to a Friend ’] has not been meted to his own.

‘ Who knows the fate of his bones or how often he is to be buried ? ’
he asks. In 1840, while workmen were lepairing the chancel of
St. Peter Mancroft, the coffin of Sir Thomas was accidentally
opened, and one of the workmen took the skull, which afterwards
came into the possession of Dr. Edward Lubbock, who deposited it
in the Museum of the Norfolk and Norwich Infirmary. When
I first saw it there in 1872 there was on it a printed slip with these
lines from the ‘ Hydriotaphia ’ : ^ To be knaved out of our graves,
to have our skulls made drinking- bowls, and our bones turned into
pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations
escaped in burning burials.’ ^

He must have written promptly to W. A. Johnson, who
replied on February 5th, saying :

... I would have liked to have been beside you while examining
what remains of old Sir Thos. Browne. How markedly England
does differ in that particular from this Country. Though we could
put the whole Island into one of our Lakes yet there is more local
interest in any one parish than theie is in the whole of our Dominion.
Say what people will about pictures, emblems, relics & the like,
they have ever been and ever will be the most delightful 8c I think
reasonable means of raising the thoughts to higher 8c holier hopes.
The more I use them the more I delight in them. Word painting
according to some eminent men in England is all that is needed but
I think they must mean ‘ needed ’ for wiser heads than mine. These
things do help meditation so much, even if they do not actually
create it. For instance, how difficult it is to recall the warmth of
feelings we experience when actually in sight of relics connected
with great names or events. Such I suppose is the legitimate use
of the crucifix. It certainly is a lively incentive to meditation &
a wonderful help to it. We protestants do not know half enough
of these things, or how to use them.

From W. 0. to his mother. February 12th [1873].

My dear Mother, Last weeks letter sent to you ^ did not count
it was but a scrap j so that this one goes to you by proper turn.

^ The ‘ Religio Medici An address delivered at Guy’s Flospital.
London, Chiswick Press, 1906, 31 pp. Bvo.

Aet. 23 A London Winter 103

A mail arrived to-day with one letter from Chattie of Jam 3rd
k some papers. ... I finished the afternoon by going to the Misses
Bov ell and had a long chat with them about West Indian friends.
They hear from the Doctor very regularly and report him very busy,
having three Parishes to attend and four Sunday Services, I did
intend to go out to Putney on Sunday to see the Atwell Francis’s
but it was such a dreary bleak day that I postponed it, Browne and
I spending a quiet Sunday together. I went to Christ Church and
after dinner took a long walk around Primrose Hill returning through
the Park. The snow has quite disappeared but an occasional flurry
with a low^ering of the Thermometer remind me that it is winter
time. London is much agitated just now over the coal question,
the prices having got up last week to 53s. per ton Sc a still further
advance is talked of. As we only have our fire in the morning and
evening it does not fall so heavily but what the poor will do if the
weather gets much colder it is difficult to say. To-day has been
remarkably clear and fine and as it was one of my days at the Brown
Institution, I enjoyed the bright view — ^not often seen — on the
river ; going up on one of the Boats. ... I send the ^ John Bull ’ of
this week to the Pater. Ask him to pass it on to J. Babmgton. I got
it thinking it would contain a full account of the Athanasian Creed
defence meeting, but you wiU see all about that in last week’s
Guardian. I am glad you have a ‘ slavey ’ that piomises well ;
Even in England they are not immaculate judging from the com-
plaints one hears. . . . Your most affectionate Son

Willie.

So the winter passed, by no means always with ^ clear
and fine ’ days, for he wrote to his sister a few weeks later :
^ My cold is much better but I cannot dispense with wipes ’’
yet. We have had three or four days of cold yellow fog,
not very thick, but horribly stuffy and it penetrates into all
the rooms, chilling ones vitals ’ ; and he adds in a postscript :
^ I send B. B. a Telegraph with Gladstones speech in it.
Tell him to excuse the dirty condition but I rescued it from
the pile which the slavey collects to light fires &c.

A paper on the results of some experimental studies
undertaken earlier in the winter was read, as he later con-
fessed, ‘ in a state of Falstafl&an dissolution and thaw on
May 1 6th before the Royal Microscopical Society, and
subsequently reported and published in its journal.^ It

^ ‘On tbe Action of Certain Reagents — ^Atropia, Pkysostigma, and
Curare— -on the Colourless Blood-corpuscles.’ Quaiterly Journal of the
Microscopical Society, 1873, xiii. 307,

104 Student Days Abroad May-Oct. 1873

represented an effort to determine whether the antagonism
between atropin and physostigmin could be demonstrated
by the behaviour of colourless corpuscles under the micro-
scope ; and though the findings were negative they served
to arouse an interest in studies of the blood, which was to
bring results later on. Incidentally the paper led to his
election as a member of the Society. His laboratory note-
book indicates that in June he had started on a new quest,
for beginning with the date 14/6/73 the entries are accom-
panied by drawings labelled ‘ Colourless elements of my
blood In the course of this investigation he very soon
ran across some peculiar globoid bodies which he attempted
to illustrate, and on certain days he found them ‘ very
plentiful

10/6/73. After fasting 15 hours examined 3 preparations of my
blood. Granular white corpuscles were found ; 2 in two of the
slides, none in the third. Fig. 5 represents the appearance of
one which looks degenerated.

The blood of other people in the laboratory was also
examined, and of various animals — modified by feeding, by
fasting, &c. :

On the 2ist from Mr. Schafer’s blood one or two masses like Fig. i
above seen [sketch]. The mass under observation on a warm stage was
at first rounded in outline and distinctly corpuscular. Within two
hours it had become more irregular in shape, while about it were
several bacteria in active movement ; connected with it were small
filaments. Unfortunately as a higher power was being adapted it
was lost.

He continued to describe and picture what he thought
to be bacteria developing from these masses ; and later on
many patients were examined — cases of Addison’s disease,
malaria, diabetes — and he succeeded in demonstrating the
masses he had discovered in many different conditions.
These studies occupied his time from June to October, and
tHs summer’s work was the basis of his first and possibly
his most important contribution to knowledge. Though
a few previous investigators had observed these bodies,
which came to be called blood platelets, or the third
element of the blood, and which play an important role in
the phenomenon of clotting, they had never before been

Aet. 24-25

The Blood Platelets

105

so thoroughly studied, and none of his predecessors’ had
actually seen them in the circulating blood. The observa-
tions, which had been conducted with great originality and
been carefully described, were assembled the next spring
on his return from the Continent, when Sanderson presented
them before the Royal Society. News of this discovery
must have reached Montreal, for in his introductory lecture
on the opening of McGill in October, Palmer Howard
spoke as follows in the course of his address :

In connection with this new subject of scientific interest, the older
students present, as well as my colleagues, will be pleased to hear that
Dr. Osier, who graduated here in 1872, has just made a discovery oi
great interest, and that promises well for the future of our young
countryman. ... I wish that some friend of this University would
endow a Chair of Physiological and Pathological Histology, and that
our young friend might be invited to accept the appointment and
devote himself solely to the cultivation of his favourite subject, and
at the same time bring honour to himself and to Canada.^

Before leaving England for the Continent, Osier evidently
struggled over the preparation of a letter to one of the
Canadian medical journals, a rough draft of which is pre-
served. It contains an apology for not having followed the
example set by Arthur Browne in sending a monthly letter,
and ends with an expostulation regarding the waste of time
and money spent by most of his young countrymen in
‘ grinding ’ to pass the English qualification examinations :
these he calls neither degrees nor honours, and advises
young Canadians to devote themselves to hospital work
rather than to waste their substance in this way. This has
a familiar sound to those who know of his later feelings
regarding these examinations. Despite these unpublished
expostulations, he nevertheless succumbed to the usual
custom and not only became a_ Licentiate of the College
in this year, but in 1878 took the examination for and was
given his M.R.C.P.

To his sister, M-is. Gwyn,fiom W. 0 . October 8th [1873].

My dear Chattie, How good I am to you — so undeserving — is
evidenced by the enclosed. It differs from the Mothers so if she
likes yours best — (which I dont) give it her. Folks here think it good

’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal 1873-4,

104 Student Days Abroad May-Oct. 1873

represented an effort to determine whether the antagonism
between atropin and physostigmin could be demonstrated
by the behaviour of colourless corpuscles under the micro-
scope ; and though the findings were negative they served
to arouse an interest in studies of the blood, which was to
bring results later on. Incidentally the paper led to his
election as a member of the Society. His laboratory note-
book indicates that in June he had started on a new quest,
for beginning with the date 14/6/73 the entries are accom-
panied by drawings labelled ‘ Colourless elements of my
blood ’. In the course of this investigation he very soon
ran across some peculiar globoid bodies which he attempted
to illustrate, and on certain days he found them ‘ very
plentiful ’.

10/6/73. After fasting 15 hours examined 3 preparations of my
blood. Granular white corpuscles were found ; a in two of the
slides, none in the third. Fig. 5 represents the appearance of
one which looks degenerated.

The blood of other people in the laboratory was also
examined, and of various animals — modified by feeding, by
fasting, &c. :

On the 2ist from Mr. Schafer’s blood one or two masses like Fig. i
above seen [sketch]. The mass under observation on a warm stage was
at first rounded in outline and distinctly coipuscular. Within two
hours it had become more irregular in shape, while about it w^ere
several bacteria in active movement ; connected wdth it were small
filaments. Unfortunately as a higher power was being adapted it
was lost.

He continued to describe and picture what he thought
to be bacteria developing from these masses ; and later on
many patients were examined — cases of Addison’s disease,
malaria, diabetes — and he succeeded in demonstrating the
masses he had discovered in many different conditions.
These studies occupied his time from June to October, and
this summer’s work was the basis of his first and possibly
his most important contribution to knowledge. Though
a few previous investigators had observed these bodies,
which came to be called blood platelets, or the third
element of the blood, and which play an important role in
the phenomenon of clotting, they had never before been

The Blood Platelets

Aet. 24-25

105

so thoroughly studied, and none of his predecessors' had
actually seen them in the circulating blood. The observa-
tions, which had been conducted with great originality and
been carefully described, were assembled the next spring
on his return from the Continent, when Sanderson presented
them before the Royal Society. News of this discovery
must have reached Montreal, for in his introductory lecture
on the opening of McGill in October, Palmer Howard
spoke as follows in the course of his address ;

In connection with this new subject of scientific interest, the older
students present, as well as my colleagues, will be pleased to hear that
Dr. Osier, who graduated here in 1872, has just made a discovery ot
great interest, and that promises well for the future of our young
countryman. ... I wish that some friend of this University would
endow a Chair of Physiological and Pathological Histology, and that
our young friend might be invited to accept the appointment and
devote himself solely to the cultivation of his favourite subject, and
at the same time bring honour to himself and to Canada ^

Before leaving England for the Continent, Osier evidently
struggled over the preparation of a letter to one of the
Canadian medical journals, a rough draft of which is pre-
served. It contains an apology for not having followed the
example set by Arthur Browne in sending a monthly letter,
and ends with an expostulation regarding the waste of time
and money spent by most of his young countrymen in
‘ grinding ’ to pass the English quahfication examinations :
these he calls neither degrees nor honours, and advises
young Canadians to devote themselves to hospital work
rather than to waste their substance in this way. This has
a familiar sound to those who know of his later feelings
regarding these examinations. Despite these unpubHshed
expostulations, he nevertheless succumbed to the usual
custom and not only became a Licentiate of the College
in this year, but in 1878 took the examination for and was
given has M.R.C.P.

To his sister, Mis. Gwyn,from W. 0 . October 8th. [1873].

My dear Chattie, How good I am to you — so undeserving — is
evidenced by the enclosed. It differs from the Mothers so if she
likes yours best — (which I dont) give it her. Folks here think it good

’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal 1873-4, 11. 208.

io6 Student Days Abroad Oct.-Nov. 1873

but it is too stern to please me. I bid goodbye to London next
Wednesday. Address me till you hear further ‘ Poste Restante,
Konigs Strasse, Berlin ’. I dare say there will often be slight irregu-
larities but I will write some one weekly. I took your boys Photo
down to the Boyds last week. They did make a row over it. The
servants had it in the Kitchen & all decided it was like its dear
Grandfather [Osier]. Thats one on the Governor — wont he be
flattered. By this time Edmund has I hope arrived & you have got
that Service book at last. I dine at the Sheppards tomorrow — have
my hands full in that Ime for the week. Tell Jennette she shall have
the first Berlin letter or Hamburg probably as I shall be there on the
mail day, though it is not unlikely I may miss next weeks post, but
I will try not to. I am rather sorry to say goodbye to London ; it is
not a bad place to spend a year in & have picked up a wrinkle oi
two which will I tiust be useful. With benedictions, Youis

WlLLIL.

Berlin

In a fragment of what appears to be a journalesque home-
letter written during his early days in Berlin, he states ;
‘ The politeness here is overwhelming, they bow you in
and out and seem in agony till you are seated, while in
meeting hats come wholly off. In rising from a table
a man will stand and make a bow to every individual he
has addressed and even to a perfect stranger if he has been
alone in a room with him. It looks well and I like to see
it ’ — and he goes on to teU of his old landlady, and getting
settled, and the picture-galleries, and a visit to Charlotten-
burg on a Sunday afternoon. It became his established
habit in later years to send, for the home consumption of
his fellows, an open letter to the editor of some medical
journal, wherein his impressions of the foreign clinics he
visited were picturesquely jotted down. And though dis-
satisfied with his effort to compose a letter from London,
he managed to write one from Berlin dated November 9th ^
in which he gives an account of the men he had seen in the
clinics and elsewhere, and of the life which he and Stephen
Mackenzie, his new friend, were leading. He comments
also on matters of domestic economy which struck him as
strange, particularly the breakfasts, and the beds — ‘ wretched
agglomeration of feathers — no sheets, no blankets, no

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, 1873-4, u. 231.

A Letter from Berlin

Aet. 24

107

quilts — ^but two feather beds, between which you must
sleep and stew, but I am now reconciled

Fiom W. 0 . to his sister^ Mis, Gwyn. 44Louisen Str. N. [Berlin],

November 23rd, 1873.

My dear Chattie, Your letter of last week was very acceptable,
for home news still comes in a jerky, erratic manner very different
to the regularity of the mail in London. Dont address any more
letters to Berlin but to the ^ Allgemeines Krankenhaus Vienna,
indeed I should have told you before, for I go on there about the end
of next month. This ought to reach you about the loth of December,
just too late to offer ‘ many happy returns of the day How old we
are getting ! Even I am nearly a quarter of a century old and not on
my own legs yet. . , . Thanks for the offer of hair but I prefer to cut
locks for myself — from heads, also, of my own choosing. Talking
about hair, it is a pity you cannot see my progressing imperial, with
which I look like a cross between a Frenclmian & an American,
I am usually taken for the former, and to my disgust get ^ Monsieured ’
or else asked interrogatively ‘ franzosisch ? ’ and when I answer
^ englisch ’ I can see it sometimes shakes the faith of an individual
in his notions of national physiognomy. My friend Mackenzie is one
of those red faced, stout, sandy-haired Englishmen whom no one
could mistake, so that we are rather a contrast. In other respects
also we are opposites, for he is an out and out Radical in Politics,
Religion, & every thing else so that we are constantly at logger
heads. However he is a hard working chap and we have but little
time to dispute about our diffeiences & get on very well together,
with the exception of a rub now Sc then. Three Edinburgh
graduates turned up, nice fellows, but we do not see much of them.
The weather has been unpleasant for the past week Sc yesterday
we had our first snowstorm, which lasted all morning, while to-day —
Sunday — it has rained incessantly. On Thursday night I had a great
treat in the way of Music, Sc I suppose it would have been a still
greater one if I had had a more educated ear. It was at one of a series
of nine concerts given annually by the Emperor’s Orchestra in the
Royal Concert room of the Opera house. I went with my friend
Dr. Gutterbock who had tickets for the series. There were over
a hundred performers all of whom are paid by the old Kaiser and
many among them are well known composers. The Music was
strictly classical, Beethoven Sc the like, somewhat over my head
but very grand. I was as much interested in the people as anything
for the elite of Berlin chiefly composed the audience. Dr. G. pointed
out most of the swells all with outlandish names, with which I will
not trouble you. Undoubtedly the women are far from good looking
yet trim Sc neat withal. Why don’t you girls do your back hair in
a Christian style ? it looks so much better plainly braided without all

io8 Student Days Abroad Nov. 1873

that horsehair padding, &c. The old ladies were even worse in point
of features than their daughters. Four within my immediate ken
could with a slight alteration in dress have sat for Sairy Gamp
The audience was evidently a most appreciative one and knew what
good Music was. I varied my programme this morning by going to
the American chapel, where they have not any fixed person to
officiate but depend on chance for some one. It is a dissenting
service, not at all bad of its kind, and the young man — a theological
student — who preached was an improvement on our steady-going
old black-gowner at the English chapel. The congregation was not
very large but thoroughly American. Usually on a Sunday we dine
out as it were, i. e. we do not go to our accustomed place, but to some
Restaurant in the Linden and then adjourn to some Conditorei to
see the Papers. Our favourite one is Spalangani’s, but it is so much
frequented by Englishmen that it is often difficult to obtain a paper.
I take my news ^ weekly ’, generally through the illustrated. . . . My
old woman has just been in and on a Sunday night usually gets very
communicative, entering fully into family history, &c. Her Mother
was the chief theme this evening and she seemed very proud to be
one of fifteen children which that remarkable woman presented to her
unhappy Fritz — she laid particular stress on this point — with praise-
worthy regularity. . . .

25th. Have you heard or seen anything lately of Mr. Johnson^
You should pay him a visit and take the lad along, . . . Dont let your
heart be troubled about German Theology. I dont want it, though
some of it may be good enough, even if a little unorthodox. My hands
are full without anything else outside ordinary Medical subjects.
Love to all Yours, &c.

Willie.

Another long letter was sent off at this time,^ evidently
written before the sanitary reforms instituted by Virchow
came to transform Berlin :

Berlin, Nov. 25th [1873].

Nature could hardly do less for a place than she has done for this.
A barren, sandy plain surrounding it on all sides without a vestige
of anything that might be called a hill ; and the muddy, sluggish
Spree, just deep enough to float barges, flowing through it towards
the Baltic, form the sole natural features. Being a modern city it is
well laid out, with wide but wretchedly paved streets ; while the
houses, though of brick, are stucco-covered and uniform, so that the
general appearance of the place is clean. Unfortunately the cleanli-
ness goes no fpther than looks, being the very opposite in reality.
The drainage is everywhere deficient, and in the greater part of the

^ To the Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ 1873-4, 3^^*

Aet. 24 For Home Consumption 109

cit7 the sewers are not even covered but skirt the pavement on' each
side, sending up a constant odour, which until one gets acclimatized
is peculiarly disgusting. The Berlinese have, however, at last roused
themselves, and the council has voted two millions sterling for
sanitary purposes, so that a striking reduction in the present high
death-rate from Typhoid and kindred diseases may be shortly
expected.

It would be superfluous to speak of the advantages here offered
for medical studies, the name of Virchow, Traube, and Frerichs in
medicine and pathology ; of Langenbeck and Bardeleben in surgery,
of DuBois-Reymond and Helmholtz in Physiology and Physics are
sufficient guarantees ; all of these men, who though they have been
prominent figures in the medical world for a long time, are still in
their prime as teachers and workers. In contrast to London, where
the teaching is spread over some twelve schools, it is here centralized
and confined to the Royal Charite, — for though there are several
smaller hospitals in the city, yet they have no schools in connection
with them, but are used chiefly for training nurses. . . . There are
only three or four Americans here, and the same number of English-
men. They go chiefly to Vienna, where greater advantages are
offered in all the specialties. The native students seem a hard*
working set, much given to long hair and slouched hats, and a remark-
able number of them wear glasses. They possess the virtue, quite
unknown as far as my experience goes, among their English or
Canadian brethren, of remaining quiet while waiting for a lecture,
or in the operating-theatre. There is never the slightest disturbance,
though most of the lecturers give what is called ^ The Academical
quarter that is they do not begin till fifteen minutes past the
appointed hour. At Langenbeck’s Clinique only, are students
allowed to smoke, and often by the time a patient is brought in the
condition of the atmosphere is such that as you look across the large
theatre from the top, the men on the opposite side are seen through
a blue haze. Quite a number of the students, more than I expected,
are badly marked with sword-cuts received in duels. One hopeful
young Spanish- American of my acquaintance has one half of his
face — they are usually on the left half — ^laid out in the most irregular
manner, the cicatrices running in all directions, enclosing areas of
all shapes — the relics of fourteen duels ! The custom has decreased
very much of late, and is now confined to a few of the smaller uni-
versity towns. A great diminution has taken place in the attendance
here within the last few years, and I am told it is greater than ever
this session, due to the increased cost of living. Speaking from a six
weeks’ experience, I find it quite as dear as London. Field-sports,
such as cricket and football are entirely unknown among the students ;
but they have a curious habit of forming small societies of ten or
twelve, who have a room at some restaurant where they meet to

I lO

Student Days Abroad Nov.-Dee. 1873

drinlc beei, smoke, and discuss various topics. If tobacco and beer
have such a deteriorating effect on mind and body, as^ some of our
advanced teetotallers affirm, we ought to see signs of it here ; but
the sturdy Teuton, judging from the events of the past few years
has not degenerated physically, at any rate, while intellectually he
is still to the fore in most scientific subjects ; whether, however,
in spite of — or with the aid of — the ‘ fragrant weed ’ and the ^ flow-
ing bowl ’ could hardly be decided. Drunkenness is not common,
at least not obtrusively so, but they appear to get a fair number of
cases of delirium tremens in the Charite, . . .

From this he went on to describe in what way the method
of clinical instruction differed from the English and Scotch
schools, and the methods of those two great teachers,
Traube and Frerichs, particularly appealed to him :

But it is the master mind of Virchow, and the splendid Patho-
logical Institute which rises like a branch hospital in the grounds of
the Charite, that specially attract foreign students to Berlin. This
most remarkable man is yet in his prime, (52 years of age), and the
small, wiry, active figure, looks good for another twenty years of
hard work ; when one knows that in addition to the work at the
Institute, given below, he is an ardent politician, evidently the
leader of the Prussian Opposition, and a member on whom a large
share of the work of the budget falls ; an active citizen, member of
the Council, and the moving spirit in the new canalization or sewer-
age system ; an enthusiastic anthropologist as well as a working
member in several smaller affairs, some idea may be formed of the
comprehensive intellect and untiring energy of the man. On
Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 8.30 to 1 1 he holds his demon-
strative course on pathology, the other mornings of the week the
course on pathological histology, while on the fourth day at one
o’clock he lectures on general pathology. Virchow himself performs
a post-mortem on Monday morning, making it with such care and
minuteness that three or four hours may elapse before it is finished.
The very first morning of my attendance he spent exactly half an
hour in the description of the skull-cap 1

On Wednesday and Saturday the demonstrations take place in
a large lecture-room accommodating about 140 students, and with
the tables so arranged that microscopes can circulate continuously
on a small tramway let into them. Generally the material from 10
to 12 post-mortems is demonstrated, the lecturer taking up any
special group and ^ enlarging on it with the aid of sketches on the
blackboard, and microscopical specimens, while the organs are passed
round on wooden platters for inspection. A well provided laboratory
for physiological and pathological chemistry also exists as well as
rooms where men may carry on private investigations ; and a library

Aet. 24 Virchow in his Prime 1 1 1

and reading-room is now being fitted up. A description of some
of the other classes and things of interest must be reserved for another
time.

The contents of this long letter were built up from the
careful notes kept in a T ages-Kalender with such care as
his difficulties with the language permitted : but his
detailed notes of what he was seeing of the clinics and above
all of Virchow’s painstaking autopsies, were to stand him
in great stead on his return. Later on, this same Tages-
Kcdender contains some daily entries regarding a brief
illness which sounds like influenza, the last of which reads :

‘ Dec. 13, Saturday. Much better, up most of the day, ate
a good dinner ; finished “Adam Bede”. Evening no head-
ache nor any pains but felt a little weak.’

Throughout his life Osier always took sufficient interest
in his own maladies to make notes upon them, usually
entered in his account-books, and, what is more, always
took advantage of being laid up in bed to surround himself
with books and to catch up on outside reading. It was in
this way that he came invariably to ‘ enjoy ’ one of his
recurring attacks of bronchitis in later years. The last of
the Berlin entries was made on December i8th, but the
subsequent pages of the Kalender contain many quotations
from books he had been reading — ^from Tyndall, from
Poincare, from ‘ The Two Gentlemen of Verona ’, &c.

On the 24th of this same December there died in Balti-
more a wealthy merchartt, Johns Hopkins, who bequeathed
his property ‘ to foster higher education ’. Little did the
young student, just completing a short three-months’
sojourn in Berlin, realize the part he was to play, sixteen
years later, in the establishment of a medical department
provided for under this great foundation.

Vienna

Such daily entries as any young man of good intentions,
in a foreign country and with a new note-book in his
pocket, might undertake to write and soon abandon, appear
in a Geschafts-D aschenhuch for 1874 :

January i. Arrived at Vienna last night, put up at Hotel Ham-
merand, explored the city in the morning and in the afternoon.

I 12

Student Days Abroad jan.-Mar. 1874

With'Schlofer’s aid went in search of lodging-house, deciding finally
on a room at Herr von Schultenkopf, No. 5 Reitergasse, Josefstadt,
Thur. xiii.

'January 2, Tr. Continued the survey of the city. Saw St.
Stephen’s Church and the chief business localities. Visited the
Allgemeines Krankenhaus with Schlofer and tried to get some idea
of its topography — rather difficult matter.

January 3, Visited the Krankenhaus again and made further
exploration in the city.

Sunday. Tried to find the English Church, but failed. Spent
the rest of the day with Schlofer and his friend Herr B.

Monday. Went to meet Hutchinson at the Nordwestbahnhof.
Had the felicity of going to 5 of the 7 stations in the city in search
of his trunk.

6 thy Tuesday. Went to the Krankenhaus and afterwards walked
round the Ring.

jthy Wednes^y. Commenced work with Bamberger at 8.30.
Neumann at 10. Wiederhoffer at ii, and Braun from 12 to 2.
Much pleased with this my first introduction to Vienna teachers
and material.

For the five months in Vienna he must have worked
assiduously and have filled up his time with all the courses
he could squeeze in, as the following account he sends
home to the Canadian journal ^ makes evident :

March ist, 1874.

^ Allgemeines Krankenhaus

... I left Berlin on the 29th of December, and stopped at Dresden
for a few days, to see the galleries there, which pleased me very
much, and then continuing my journey I arrived here on New
Year’s day. With the aid of a Yankee friend, I soon obtained a room
in Reitergasse, close to the Krankenhaus. The Krankenhaus is
arranged in nine courts, occupying a whole district in the city, and
accommodating more than two thousand patients. We were not long
in getting to work, and our daily programme is as follows :

At about half-past eight we go to Hebra, who visits his wards at
this hour, and at nine we go to his lecture-room. Undoubtedly he
is the lecturer of the Vienna School, and he combines the humorous
and instructive in a delightful way. I generally go every other
morning to Bamberger, who lectures at the same hour, on General
Medicine. He is a splendid diagnostician, but is, I think, inferior
to those Berlin giants, Traube and Frenchs. At ten we have another
hour on the skin, from Neumann who has the run of Hebra’s wards,
and an out-patient department of his own. He enters more par-

^ The Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, 1873-4, ii. 451.

Aet. 24 The Vienna Clinics 1 1 3

ticulaily into individnal cases than Hebra and gives us more differen-
tial diagnosis. At eleven, we go to Wiederhoffer the professor in the
children’s department, and have there in the first half-hour a series
of selected cases, and in the second a lecture. There are not many
in his class, so that one has a good chance to examine the children
oneself. At twelve I attend a course on ear diseases with Politzer,
not that I am going to make a specialty of them but I thought it
well worth while, when an opportunity occurred, to make their
acquaintance. Politzer is good, and shows us a great many cases,
and makes us pass the Eustachian Catheter daily. At one, Braun
the Professor of Obstetrics, lectures, but more of the Clinique
shortly. Between two and four we dine, and take our constitutional,
and at four we have a class on the laryngoscope. This is a six weeks’
course, and I am just beginning another and take kindly to the
larynx. At five we have one of our very best classes, viz: obstetric
operations, with Bandl, Braun’s first assistant, in which after as much
theory as is needful, work begins on the cadaver. I begin next week
to go on duty about every fifth or sixth day and hope to get three
or four forceps cases before leaving. Altogether, midwifery and
skin diseases are the specialties in Vienna, while in general medicine
and pathology it is infinitely below Berlin. . . .

After having seen Virchow it is absolutely painful to attend post-
mortems here, they are performed m so slovenly a manner, and so
little use is made of the material. Professor Rokitansky lectures at
twelve, but usually to less than a dozen men. Most of the six or
eight weeks’ courses, for which the school is so famous, are ^2, but
the ordinary university ones only so that it quickly mounts up,
especially if one takes second courses. I do not attend any surgical
classes, having as you see my hands full, but we go to Billroth occasion-
ally, and I shall take a course of operations from his assistant before
I leave.

Americans swarm here, there are fifty or sixty of them at least,
and Great Britain is represented by five or six Edinburgh men and
a couple of Londoners. The city itself is very beautiful, having
a splendid wide street, like the Thames embankment, surrounding
the inner town, and occupying the position of the old wall and moat.
I expect to leave about the end of Apiil, and shall touch at Paris
on my way home, to see the city. . .

And he went on to give a long account of a seventieth-
birthday celebration in honour of Carl Rokitansky, which
‘ the city, university and students all combined to celebrate
in true German fashion and in a manner worthy of them-
selves and of the distinguished man who has so long shed
lustre on their school

Osier was evidently aiming to get the broadest possible

2923 I I

Aet. 24 Rather Shakesperian 1 1 5

have been freely talked of in laboratory circles, even though
London operating rooms were admittedly slow to adopt
Lister’s principles.

To Miss Jennette Osier from W» O, Vienna, March 22nd.

M7 dear Jennette, ... I trust this week to begin my homeward
progress and will probably get as far as Paris by Saturday. It is
a matter of some forty hours by rail and I shall probably break the
journey either at Munich or Strassburg, the galleries attracting at the
former, the laboratories at the latter. A good deal will depend on
how I feel on getting to Munich after a night on the train. My
friend Hutchinson is still in Paris 8 c will act as guide there. I expect
to be in London for Easter Sunday. As a pleasing change we had our
proper Parson at the chapel to-day, in whose place a converted
Native has been officiating for some time. Anything — High — Low —
Broad — will do for me after six months on the Continent. The
chaplain here, a Mr. Johnson, is a remarkably fine looking old man,
with long white hair & a face which reminds me of the portraits
of the old Musicians. There is a dash of sadness also about it as
though he was one of those who did not ‘ take the current when it
served and hence the consequence — a chaplaincy abroad, instead
of a Bishopric at home. You see I am rather Shakespearian tonight.
Shakespeare has been my light literature for some time : that
accounts for it. We — Stephen [Mackenzie] & I — went for a long
walk this afternoon to the Prater Park 8 c the new Danube Channel
in process of making. This latter is a wonderful work of engineering.
... I am going to do the Royal Treasury and Stables, with one or
two other little things this week, & then shall have pretty well
finished the Vienna sights. My next wiU probably be dated Paris.
Love to all Yours

Willie.

It was not until 1908 that Osier revisited Vienna. He
sent home a letter at the time, intended for the American
medical profession.^ The paragraphs which describe the
influence of the Vienna School on American medicine
deserve reprinting :

I spent the first few months of 1874 here. I came from Berlin with
Hutchinson, an Edinburgh man (Sir Charles F., who has recently
died), and we lived together near the AUgemeines Krankenhaus. As
illustrating the total blotting out of certain memories, particularly
for places, I may mention that strolling to-day up the Alserstrasse
I could not recall the street, much less the house, where we had lived

^ ‘ Vienna after Thirty-four Years ’ Journal of the American Medical
Association^ May 9, 1908, 1. 1523.

ii6 Student Days Abroad Mar 1874

for the four months. I found my way readily enough to the Riedhof,
where we were in the habit of dining, and where I first met my old
friends, Fred Shattuck, E. H. Bradford, E. G. Cutler, and Sabine of
Boston. An extraordinary development has taken place in the city
within thirty years, and I scarcely recognized the Ringstrasse. Then,
only the foundations of the new university buildings and of the
Rathaus had been begun. Now these, with the parliament house,
the courts of justice, the twin museums of art and natural history,
and the new Bourg Theatre, form a group of buildings unrivalled
in any city. ... As a medical centre, Vienna has had a remarkable
career, and her influence particularly on American medicine has been
very great. What was known as the first Vienna School in the
eighteenth century was really a transference by van Swieten of the
School of Boerhaave from Leyden. The new Vienna School, which
we know, dates from Rokitansky and Skoda, who really made Vienna
the successor of the great Pans School of the early days of the nine-
teenth century. But Vienna’s influence on American medicine has
not been so much through Skoda and Rokitansky as through the
group of brilliant specialists — Hebra, Sigmund and Neumann in
dermatology ; Arlt and Jaegar in ophthalmology ; Schnitzler and
von Schrotter in laryngology ; Gruber and Politzer in otology.
These are the men who have been more than otheis responsible for
the successful development of these specialties in the United States.
Austria may well be proud of what Vienna’s school has done for the
world, and she still maintains a great reputation, though it cannot be
denied, I think, that the iEsculapian centre has moved from the
Danube to the Spree. But this is what has happened in all ages.
Minerva Medica has never had her chief temples in any one country
for more than a generation or two. For a long period at the Renais-
sance she dwelt in northern Italy, and from all parts of the world men
flocked to Padua and to Bologna. Then for some reason of her own
she went to Holland, where she set up her chief temple at Leyden
with Boerhaave as her high priest. Uncertain for a time, she flitted
here with Boerhaave’s pupils, van Swieten and de Haen ; and could
she have come to terms about a temple she doubtless would have
stayed permanently in London where she found in John Hunter
a great high priest. In the first four decades of the nineteenth
century she lived in France, where she built a glorious temple to
which all flocked. Why she left Paris, who can say ? but suddenly
she appeared here, and Rokitansky and Skoda rebuilt for her the
temple of the new Vienna School, but she did not stay long. She had
never settled in Northern Germany, for though she loves art and
science she hates with a deadly hatred philosophy and all philo-
sophical systems applied to her favourite study. Her stately German
shrines, her beautiful Alexandrian home, her noble temples, were
destroyed by philosophy. Not until she saw in Johannes Muller and

Aet. 24 Minerva Medica 1 1 7

in Rudolph Virchow true and loyal disciples did she move to Ger-
many, where she stays in spite of the tempting offers from France,
from Italy, from England, and from Austria.

In an interview most graciously granted to me, as a votary of long
standing, she expressed herself very well satisfied with her present
home where she has much honour and is much appreciated. I boldly
suggested that it was perhaps time to think of crossing the Atlantic
and setting up her temple m the new world for a generation or two.

I spoke of the many advantages, of the absence of tradition — ^here she
visibly weakened, as she has suffered so much from this poison — the
greater freedom, the enthusiasm, and then I spoke of missionary
work. At these words she turned on me sharply and said : ‘ That is
not for me. We Gods have but one motto — those that honour us we
honour. Give me the temples, give me the priests, give me the true
worship, the old Hippocratic service of the art and of the science of
ministering to man, and I will come. By the eternal law under which
we Gods live I would have to come. I did not wish to leave Paris,
where I was so happy and where I was served so faithfully by Bichat,
by Laennec and by Louis ’ — and the tears filled her eyes and her voice
trembled with emotion — ‘ but where the worshippers are the most
devoted, not, mark you, where they are the most numerous , where
the clouds of incense rise highest, there must my chief temple be,
and to it from all quarters will the faithful flock. As it was in Greece,
in Alexandria, in Rome, in Northern Italy, in France, so it is now in
Germany, and so it may he in the new world I long to see,’ Doubtless
she will come, but not till the present crude organization of our
medical clinics is changed, not until there is a fuller realization of
internal medicine as a science as well as an art.

Early in April he returned to London to complete the
paper dealing with his researches in Sanderson’s laboratory,
and to revisit his friends and relatives before his departure
to Canada.

’To his sister from W, 0 . Thuisday, April i6th.

My dear Chattie, Your letter addressed U.C.H. arrived all right
to-day. I am still in London having postponed my Cornwall visit
till next week. I had intended to go down on Saturday but Prof.
Sharpey the Vice-President of the Royal Society most kindly gave
me an introduction to their Soiree which comes off next Wednesday
& as it is a very swell affair — swell in my line — I shall wait for it.
I have been very busy since my return, spending the whole day at
the Laboratory frdm 9 a.m. to five. I am glad to hear such good
news of the Staplehurst people & I suppose by the time I get home
they will look themselves again. I leave from London somewhere
about the 20th May so that early in June you may be on the look

ii8 Student Days Abroad Apr.-May 1874

out. ' I heard Canon Liddon last Sunday afternoon at St. Pauls ;
he is as good as ever. I have got very low-church lately & am
afraid Fathers Johnson and Wood will be horrified. ... I am scrawling
away in the Library of the Coll of Surgeons where I have been
hunting up some references and had almost forgotten about the
Canadian mail. Another budget of letters were forwarded from
Vienna a few days ago. I dined last evening with the Schafers at
Highgate. The son is Sanderson’s Assistant in the laboratory and has
been very kind, assisting me in many ways. They are nice people,
& such nice gttls. I did not know who Sophie ivas engaged to
until yesterday when on calling at the Sheppards they told me all
about it. Goodbye old girl pro tern. Love to all Yours

WiLLIt.

Reminders of the affair which was ‘ swell in my line ’ are
to be found in two of the books in Osier’s library. In one
of them he mentions having met Charles Darwin at this
soiree, and of the pleasure it gave him to have the kindly
old man with bushy eyebrows speak pleasantly of Principal
Dawson of McGill. And it is quite probable that it was
at a dinner beforehand that Sharpey gave him as a memento
the volume in which he subsequently made the following
note :

Professor Sharpey had resigned the previous year but was much
about the laboratory and often came to my desk in a friendly way
to see the progress of my blood studies. One evening he asked me
to dinner ; Kolliker, Allen Thompson and Dohrn were there.
When saying goodbye he gave me Davy’s Researches with an autograph
inscription.

It must have been a treat for the young man to meet
these distinguished anatomists and .friends of Sharpey’s in
this intimate way. Kolliker, a Swiss of the highest dis-
tinction, was at the time Professor in Wurzburg, while
Anton Dohrn was Director of the Naples Zoological
Station. Like Sharpey himself, they were anatomists of the
physiological school.

His‘ scrawling in the library ’ was probably in completion
of his paper submitted on May 6th, and presented by Burdon
Sanderson on June i8th before the Royal Society after he
had sailed for home.^ The title was not particularly

^ * An Account of Certain Organisms Occurring in the Liquor Sanguinis.'
Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1874, 39I-8.

Aet. 24 Completing his Researches 1 1 9

fortunate, and the paper contains a hint as to the possible
relation to bacteria of the masses of blood platelets which
others had seen before him. This can only be accounted
for by the influence of H. C. Bastian, whose ‘ The Begin-
nings of Life’ had just appeared, and whose views on
spontaneous generation may have permeated even into his
colleague Sanderson’s laboratory at University College.
The most important fact brought out by the study, and
which was quite novel, was that these ‘ elementary par-
ticles ’ as they were called, are discrete in the circulating
blood and never clumped, as is always the case after blood
is drawn ; and Osier’s figure showing them within a small
vein is still in use in text-books of histology.^

^ The importance of this study has been fully commented upon by
W. T, Councilman Some of the Early Medical Work of William Osier
Johns Hopkins Hosp. Bulletin^ July 1919, xxx 193-7). There were three
subsequent papers in which he added still further to the knowledge of
these platelets : viz * Infectious Endocarditis Archives of Medicine^ N. Y.,
1881, V. 44, in which he discussed the newly accepted view of their relation
to thrombus formation This was further elaborated in an article, ^ Ueber
den dritten Formbestandteil des Elutes Centralblatt fur d med, Wissen-
schaften, 1882, xx. 529 Again in a final article ‘On the Third Corpuscle
of the Blood’, Medical New^, Phila., 1883, xliii. 701, he gave a general
presentation of the subject.

CHAPTER VI

1874-S

THE YOUNG PROFESSOR AT McGILL

After liis long absence Osier had returned to Canada
with empty pockets, and naturally anxious for a job. It is
recorded that for a time he took over the work of a local
practitioner in Dundas, and the first fee as a practising
physician entered in his account-book reads, ^ Speck in
cornea . . . 50^2^ ’ — an entry he was known to point out to
aspiring young M.D/s in later years with a twinkle in his
eye. He also served for a month as locum tenens for
Dr. Charles O’Reilly, a McGill graduate who had long
been Resident Physician at the City Hospital in Hamilton,
and tradition relates that he took the post ^ for the con-
sideration of $25 and a pair of old-fashioned elastic-sided
boots which had proved too small for Charlie O’Reilly
However this may be, he was not long left in uncertainty
as to his future :

To W, O.from Palmer Howard, 47 Union Avenue, Montreal,

July 6th, ’74.

My dear Osier, — I have just ret'^ from a Meeting of the Med^
Faculty of the College at which I am happy to be able to inform
you It was agieed to recommend you to the Governor of the
College for the office of Lecturer upon Institutes in the room
of Dr, Drake who resigns on account of ill health. You have not
been spending your time in vain in working at practical physiology
and I must heartily congratulate you upon this fine prospect that
has opened before you. The fees of the students will at least meet
your actual expenses for board, clothes, etc., and the position in the
college will afford the strongest proof to the public that you are
at least a well qualified physician and that experience is all that you
require to merit their patronage. I would advise you to come down
at once, hang out your shingle, and set actively to work upon your
lectures — ^you will find the time short enough. Drake can be of
much assistance and is willing to be ; and he has a fine collection
of diagrams which will be of use and which he will no doubt dispose
of to you very reasonably. You will receive an official letter from
the Dean no doubt by the same mail that conveys this — answer it
at once. The time is a favourable one moreover at which to enter

Act. 25

Another Offer from McGill

121

upon practice — for although you will have to wait for that like
others- — labour will procure its reward in that field also. Please
present my congratulations to y^ father upon this gratifying recogni^
tion of y^ merits by the oldest medical school in Canada. All
y^ friends here will be much pleased on your account. I regretted
to have missed you on your arrival from Europe as you must
have had lots of recent information to impart and as I wanted to
hear of your doings — but you know what I was about and no doubt
will forgive me, I hope soon to see you here and to hear of y^
affairs Till then I remain Very sincerely yours

R. P. Howard.

Preserved with this letter is the fragmentary draft of
Osier’s reply, which says :

... I do not accept without some diffidence, still I hope to be able
to work up a decent set of Lectures. I am glad it is only a Lecture-
ship. It not only sounds better (as I am so young), but to my
English friends Sanderson, Sharp ey, Klein, &c , it will seem more
in keeping with what they know of my attainments. It now remains
to be seen whether with teaching & [private practice] I can follow
up any original work Of course I shall try hard.

Meanwhile, during his few weeks in Dundas and Hamilton
he had cemented friendships with members of the local
profession. Indeed he never failed to ingratiate himself,
wherever he might be, with the older practitioners in par-
ticular, towards whom he always felt especially drawn. So
an enduring attachment was established at this time with
two Hamiltonians of an older generation, themselves in-
timate friends : Dr. John A, MuUin and Dr. Archibald
Malloch, a fine Scot, one of Lister’s pupils and the leading
surgeon of the region. Evidence of his affection for and
interest in the doctors of the old school ’ — men like
James Hamilton, who practised sixty years in West Flamboro
— crops out in many of his writings. There was, for example,
a Dr. Case, who in 1809, when four years of age, had been
brought from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada by his U. E.
loyalist father. For fully forty years he had occupied
a house in Hamilton, on the corner of King and Walnut
Streets, and long after he had given up practice he was
wont to sit in the window and nod to his numerous acquain-
tances, or reminisce with those who would drop in and pass
the time of day with him. This Osier never failed to do

122 McGill University Juiy-Aug. 1874

when in Hamilton, and some years later in an editorial
entitled ‘ Doctors’ Signs in which he poked fun at this
questionable form of advertising, he ends with this paragraph :

Happ7 the man whose reputation is such or whose local habitation
is so well known that he needs no sign ! This is sometimes the case
in country places and small towns, not often in cities. We know of
one such in a prosperous Canadian city. Grandfather, father and
son have been in ‘ the old stand ’ so long that to the inhabitants of
the locality the doctor’s house is amongst the things which have
always been. The patients’ entrance is in a side street and a small
porch protects the visitor. The steps are well worn and the native
grain is everywhere visible in the wooden surroundings. There is
neither bell nor knocker and the door presents interesting and, so
far as we know, unique evidences that votaries to this dEsculapian
shrine have not been lacking. On the panels at difterent heights
are three well-worn places where the knuckles of successive genera-
tions of callers have rapped and rapped and rapped. The lowest
of the three, about three feet from the floor, represents the work
of ‘ tiny Tim ’ and ^ little Nell ’, so often the messengers in poorer
families. Higher up and of less extent is a second depression where
^ Bub ’ and ‘ Sis ’ have pounded, and highest of all, in the upper
panel a wider area i-vheie the firmer fists of the fathers and brothers
have as the years rolled on worn away the wood to nearly half its
thickness. Such a testimony to the esteem and faithfulness of
successive generations of patients is worthy of preservation.^

He must have proceeded to Montreal about the first of
August, to judge from an account-book of this period —
almost the last in which he took the trouble to itemize his
expenditures. It begins : ^ Fare, Hamilton to Montreal,
$12.50 ’ ; and his first entries after his arrival are :

Fees for Desk and Chair on acct. . . . . 12.25

Book case, on account . . ...

Ton of coal ....... 8,00

Subscription to ^ Churchman ’ . . .3.00

Book bill Dawsons ...... 20.00

Rent of room $10 per month

He thus with a desk, a chair, a bookcase, and a ton of coal
furnished a room at 20 Radegonde Street, below Beaver Hall
Hill, in the lower part of Montreal, and there he hung out

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Dec. 1885, 3 ^ 2 * When the

old house was finally demolished in 1894 ^he door was saved and is now in
the Hamilton museum in Dundurn Park.

Aet. 25 Preparing Lectures 123

his ^ shingle though it does not appear that any patients
were ever attracted thereby, nor, had they been, that he
would have been found at home. His first task, for which
he had little taste, was to prepare the formal lectures for
the year, and, as he later confessed, he groaned heavily over
the obligation : When I returned to Montreal in Sep-
tember 1874 the Professor of the Institutes of Medicine
had had to retire on account of heart disease, and instead
of getting, as I had hoped, a position as his demonstrator
the Faculty appointed me lecturer with the ghastly task of
delivering four systematic lectures a week for the winter
session, from which period dates my ingrained hostility to
this type of teaching.’ One of the pupils in his first class.
Dr. Beaumont Small of Ottawa, thus writes of his impres-
sions :

I saw him first as he entered the lecture-room to open his course
on the Institutes of Medicine. Quick and active, yet deliberate in
his walk and manner, with a serious and earnest expression, it was
evident that he looked upon his lectures as serious, and at once
imparted the same feeling to others. In a very few words he wel-
comed his class, stated what he hoped to do and what he expected
in return, concluding with a gentle warning that he expected atten-
dance and attention from all. We succumbed to that genial and
kindly manner which has been so characteristic throughout his life,
and I doubt if any professor had more carefully studied lectures, or
better attention than was given to him.

The lecture began with an explanation of the old Edinburgh term
of Institutes of Medicine. Then in bold outline he sketched in-
organic and organic matter, vegetable and organic life*, vital force,
and closed with a description of cellular life and an outline of future
lectures. From that hour physiology was an attractive study and
the lectures like unto the Gods.

When I look back upon that period it is evident that 1 876-7 was
the beginning of a period of renaissance for McGill, and Osier the
moving spirit, but it would not be right to impart to him all the
credit. The recent appointments to the Faculty of Ross, Roddick,
Shepherd and Gardner, all young and energetic, of the highest type
of professional standing, was not without design. These supported
by the mature wisdom of Dean Campbell, R. P. Howard and
Craik could mean only progress and resulted in the reputation that
McGill achieved during the succeeding decade.

The period, as Dr. Small says, was truly one of a new
birth for McGill, and though by no means due to Osier

entirely, his personality nevertheless — there as in other
places during his subsequent migrations — proved to be the
leaven which raised the loaf, as shown by the flattening-
out which always followed his departure.

‘ Jimmie ’ Johnson had entered the school, and for
various reasons Osier’s advances in the way of giving him
financial aid and of taking him as a boarder were rejected.
Father Johnson, if one may judge from his letters to Ixis son,
undoubtedly felt that the unorthodox and non-sectarian
environment of University College had had a demoralizing
effect upon his former pupil : he could not stomach the
fact that Osier had gone to an institution where youths on
their admission were not obliged to sign the Thirty-nine
Articles, and which revered the secular Jeremy Bentham to
the extent of preserving in its museum his clothed skeleton
— for he had left his body to be dissected at University
College. One of the letters is particularly severe — ^to the
effect that Osier’s power of application was the single
characteristic worthy of imitation. But this after all was
what Osier often said of himself — that he had but a single
talent — a capacity for industry. Osier, however, could
apply himself not to work alone, but to play as well, and
always knew where to find children with whom he could
frolic. His cousin writes : ‘ Willie dropped in four times
on Saturday ; he stole the new kitten, and now the old
kitten, and the children are wondering where she is. He
has just come in to tea.’

During these years in Montreal chance brought him into
frequent contact with a group of men who were enriching
Canada and incidentally themselves by transactions con-
cerned with the opening up of the great West. He often
recalled in later years how at this time his brother, ‘ E. B.’,
then chairman of the Temiskaming or some other railway,
used to come down to Montreal nearly every week, and
how on his return from the college or hospital he would find
a note from Donald A. Siruth (afterwards Lord Strathcona),
saying : ‘ At 7.00 as your brother is down.’ R. B. Angus,
McIntyre, George Stephen, and others would be likely to
be there also ; and after the meal, in spite of Osier’s presence,
the talk would be on matters foreign to his taste and under-

Aet. 25 Sphyranura Osier t 125

standing — of finance and the affairs of the C. P. R., which
was going through a period of hard sledding. Far more to
his taste was the monthly dinner club formed by a group
of the younger members of the Faculty — a club famous
for the pranks and practical jokes its members played on
one another. In this coterie^ Osler^s chief intimates, with
the possible exception of Arthur Browne, were George Ross
and Francis J. Shepherd, and such outings as he permitted
himself to engage in were usually taken ^ up country ’ in
company with these two.^

He went home to Dundas for the Christmas recess,
stopping off for a visit with the Toronto relatives ; and
while there, as was characteristic of him, he dropped in to
introduce himself and to give a welcome to the newly
appointed Professor of Biology in the Toronto School, who
had come from Edinburgh. Ramsay Wright had recently
arrived in Toronto to take this post, and he recalls that
Osier, behaving like an old acquaintance, and stating that
he had borrowed his brother Edmund’s carriage for the
purpose of driving out to see his old preceptor in Weston,
asked if he would not go along. They found Johnson wear-
ing cassock and cross, and living alone in the old rectory,
for his wife before this had left him, to go and live with
one of their sons. They shared a frugal meal prepared by
Johnson and laid out on a plain deal table, beside which
they sat on a pine board seat. But there was talk of natural
history, particularly of animal parasites and of some of the
entozoa they had found and observed but were unable to
identify. One of these in particular, a trematode worm
found in the gills of a newt. Professor Wright subsequently
became sufficiently interested in to describe in full in his
first paper published in Toronto. In view of the source of
his primary introduction to Canadian helminthology at the
time of this Christmas visit to Weston, he named this
particular species Sphyranura Oslen?

^ Dr. F. J. Shepherd relates that in 1874 Osier examined both him and
Ross for life insurance, he being rejected owing to a valvular lesion of the
heart. Of the three he alone survives.

^ R Ramsay Wright : ‘ Contributions to American Helminthology
Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, new series, Vol. I, No. i, 1879.
Sphyranura Oslen, nov, gen, et spec, ‘I have lately received [he wrote]

126 McGill University Jan. 1875

T 0 F, J, Shefheri from W, 0 . No. 20 Radegonde St., Montreal,

January ist, 1875.

My dear Shepherd, I was so glad to get your note from Marburg.
You did nicely to go to a small University town where English
Students are scarce. One sees more of German life in that way
& picks up the language in half the time. When do you go on to
Wien ? I shall call on your people this afternoon and find out where
I am to address this letter. I am glad you saw Philpot in London :
he is a first rate fellow & his introductions will be useful. The
‘ Riedhof ’ Restaurant you will no doubt patronize in Vienna. It
is about the best and you are sure of meeting other English fellows
there. When do you return ? & are you going to settle in Montreal ?
There is a talk of the Dean resigning in the spring and of course
there will be a vacancy in consequence. Or in any case there must
be a vacancy before long and the Demonstratorship will be open.
The question is : why should not you get it ? Cameron of course
win be in the field ; but I am sure if a vacancy occurs in the spring
& Chipman goes out of the Hospital leaving Cameron full Surgeon,
there will be opposition to his holding both appointments ; and
you would have backers for the Demonstratorship among the Faculty.
Remember this comes solely from me. I have heard no other
opinions on the subject. I think however you would be wise in
paying some attention to practical anatomy in Vienna and attend
the lectures of HyrtPs successor- — whoever he is. The courses on
operative surgery by Billroth’s assistant are also splendid. I am
working away at my lectures and so far have got on fairly well.
Do you return by way of Paris ? If so I would like you to execute
a little commission for me there ; and I may also trouble you to
bring a few little things from Germany. I will send a list & place
the dimes to your credit at — where ? Bk. of Montreal here or London ?

Yours very sincerely

W“^ OSLER.

Preparing for these formal old-time lectures, such as were
expected of a teacher in the ^70^$, must have been a torment
to him. The portfolio, tanned with, exposure and chapped

from my friend Professor Osier, of Montreal, several specimens of a worm
taken from the gills and cavity of the mouth of our common lake-lizard
{Necturus lateralis, Raf.). These had been preserved for eight years in
Goadby’s fluid, and proved to be comparatively useless for further examina-
tion, having become quite opaque and black m colour. From some specimens,
in a good state of preservation, mounted by Dr. Osier for microscopical
examination, and also from his notes and sketches made on observation of
the fresh specimen, I am able to communicate the following. The only
specimen of Necturus which I have had the opportunity of examining since
receiving these did not yield any of the worms . . . ’

Aet. 25 As a Doctor: now a Priest 127

with rough handling in which he carried them, holds to-day
a few yellow, much-foxed sheets with the students’ names,
and this note written in a later hand :

This is my lecture portfolio with the list of students in the last
class (1883-4) which I lectured at McGill. The rule was to call
the roll once a week, but as the list shows this was not always carried
out. For the first few yeais I wrote out and read my lectures. I am
sorry no copy has been kept for I destroyed them all on leaving
Montreal. Then I got into the habit of lecturing from slips, two
of which are here preserved, one on the skin and the other on glycogen.

To W, O,from W, A. Johnson. The Parsonage, Weston,

March 4th, 1875.

My dear Osier, — I suppose you are getting to the close of a first
term now &'are getting a little breathing time. I never seem to
forget you. . , . There are few, very few conditions in this world,
in w^ men may not, and do not jostle one another, cross one another’s
path, get into one another’s way, so to speak. Friendships may be
formed, but circumstances interfere with them. The nearer our
calling or occupation or profession is alike, the more likely to cross
one another. I always had, & have still the highest esteem for oui
mutual friend D'' Bovell as a D"* but I do not know how to address
him as a Priest. With his medical opinions I could not differ ; only
do as he told me to : it is not so with religious opinions, there might
be different opinions leading to different ends oi doctrines, & demand-
ing diverging or crossing courses of action. It is pleasant to have
a friend in whose case these things can not occur. It is pleasant to
feel that what your friend is doing, is right (for you can not even
surmise it is wrong) & ask a blessing on it. This is the kind of spot
left in my memory of yourself. . . . Are you working especially at
any one point this winter ? I look for a specimen or two : anything ;
it will be interesting, & always serve as a remembrancer. How is
Jimmie doing? ... He has twice or thrice mentioned, when sending
an a/c of fees paid or unpaid, that you had given him his ticket ;
& intimated or said, it was not necessary to pay for it. I know your
kindness would suggest this, but you aie not indebted to me m any
way to warrant such a deprivation. ...

I suppose you must have noticed that, to all appearance, I did
not do the kind thing to your dear Father & others on the Com^
w^ the Bp. [Bishop] appointed to find charges against me. Whether
you thought so or not, there was good reason from all the pnbhc has
seen, to think so. I was very peculiarly placed, and saw no way but
irony to meet it. I am waiting the Bp’s decision before writing a last
letter, apologizing for seeming rude, & showing why that was the
only course open to me. Two most important principles were

128 McGill University Mar 1875

assailed. I told the Bp. I dare not be a party to the proceedings.
He tried to force me. I could not submit. I must meet the Com^
or my case would go by default : I could not appear or the principle
was compromised : I could not touch the subject by way of evidence,
or reason upon it, because it had not been heard : 8 c having assured
the Bp. he had no authority whatever to create the commission,
irony was the only way to show I meant all I said, Sc defy further
proceedings. I know irony 8 c sarcasm drive away one’s friends,
therefore you had better never attempt to use them : but they have
their time & place, Sc looking at it now with calm Sc unbiased view
I still think I did well, & if the same causes arose would treat them
as I did then. The private correspondence between the Bp. Sc myself
is the only means of understanding the matter, but this shall never
be made public with my consent alone The poor Bp. whose kind-
ness to me is unwearied and real, expressive of high praise also, is
really in a tight ’ place. I have promised to obey his orders imme-
diately & without a murmur, but neither to gainsay or accept his
opinions, I have removed every obstacle to his decision that I know
of, & I hope daily to receive it.

Is there any chance of your coming up this way after Easter?
I suppose the smallpox hospital keeps you more or less busy ; but
the number of patients decreases a good deal towards spring Sc
summer, so you might get away for a trip to see, & gladden old faces
again. Everything much as usual here. I have not paid the Humber
Ponds a single visit this winter, & now we are snowed in in every
direction. With my best wishes for your success, health & happiness,
Sc hoping to have a line, when you have time Sc inclination believe
me, as ever Your sincere and affect® friend,

W. A. Johnson.

It was a dictum of Southey’s that ^ a man’s character
can more surely be judged by those letters which his friends
addressed to him than by those he himself penned, for they
are apt to reveal with unconscious faithfulness the regard
held for him by those who knew him best ’. And there
might be added to this statement — particularly if they were
letters which the recipient saw fit to preserve* There
need be no other excuse for the inclusion in this story of
these several epistles from Johnson, much as one might
prefer to see those passing in the other direction. They
were among the few old letters found among Osier’s papers,
for it was not his habit to preserve correspondence. Poor
Johnson ! It was a needless warning to his favourite pupil
that he should be a stranger to irony and sarcasm. Aban-

Aet. 25

A Valedictory Address 129

doned by his wife, it is said that Johnson never again locked
the door of the rectory ; but though a lonesome old man
he did not live in the past alone, as this note by Miss Kathleen
Lizars of Toronto indicates :

When I was eleven and twelve years old I spent many week-ends
with the Rev. Mr. Johnson. The picture of him is in my mind
quite clearly, even across this space of time. Tall, spare, his hair
brushed straight back in the style now affected by young men,
austere and lovable in combination ; always in his cassock, and the
cross hanging unostentatiously, always with his house half full of
people and most of them young. He often talked of his boys, but
I did not take it in then what he meant. The school had gone long
before I knew him. His ritualistic practices (very ordinary for
nowadays) earned the enmity of the villagers — we were always
awestruck at the signs of broken windows and marks of stones or
hatchets on the altar.

On March 31st Osier gave the valedictory address to the
graduating class at the annual convocation. It was his first
effort in this direction, and though he probably agonized
over it as most young men would under the circumstances,
it shows little of the literary quality which gave the charm
to his later addresses. They were often better in the
material than in the manner of delivery, for he never
possessed those oratorical gifts not uncommon among
medical teachers which make possible the impressive pre-
sentation of material that proves to be shadowy in substance
on later perusal. One finds in this brief address, never-
theless, many hints of the professional points of view he
came to acquire. It is therefore an epitome of things he
continued to dwell upon more and more emphatically as
the years progressed. After pointing out that their training
was incomplete, that they must be students always, since
medicine, unlike law and theology, is a progressive science,
he urges them to keep up with their reading, to cultivate
books, to get in the habit of attending societies and report-
ing experiences, thus co-operating with the journals. He
points out that behaviour is more certain to bring success
than ‘ a string of diplomas ’ ; quotes Sir Thomas Browne
to the effect that ‘ No one should approach the temple of
science with the soul of a money-changer ’ ; touches on
their obligations to the poor, on the question of livelihood,
2923-1

K

130 McGill University Apr. 187$

on -the relationship between doctors, and ends with an
appeal for sobriety, more needed happily by students of
those days than of the present. Still a total abstainer him-
self, some of his more intimate young friends, men of the
greatest promise in the profession, were already going to
the ground, despite his personal efforts to help them, of
which there are many stories.

At the end of the semester Osier was officially appointed
to Dr. Drake’s chair as Professor.^ He had distinctly made
good during his year as Lecturer. His industry, to which,
as already told, he often referred as his single talent, was
prodigious. He was not content merely with the mapping
out of his new course and preparing the necessary lectures,
a task arduous enough in itself. Having no hospital position
and being eager for opportunities in the pathological
laboratory, he volunteered for this work, and though it
was the custom at the time for the visiting physicians and
surgeons at the Montreal General to perform their own
autopsies, they came more and more to lean upon Osier for
this purpose, and it was inevitable that in time the position
of Pathologist should be created for him.

Nor did he fail even in these early days to prod others.
Some one once said in after years that it was always a
pleasure to receive even a postcard from Osier, in spite of
the drawback that it often suggested a lot of work. The
following hint to Shepherd to send an open letter to
Fenwick, who was editor of the local journal, has therefore
what comes to be a familiar ring :

‘To F. J. Shepherd from W. 0 . April 6th, 1875.

My dear Shepherd, — I am delighted to be able to inform you that
at a meeting of the Faculty last evening you were appointed Demon-
strator of Anatomy, & allow me to offer you my sincere con-
gratulations on the occasion. An official letter from Craik will
either accompany or follow this, and containing also a recommenda-
tion to take advantage of the remaining time at your disposal to

^ Dr. Maude Abbott relates that in 1908, when Sir William paid one of his
periodical visits to the Pathological Museum at McGill, she showed him a
heart among the specimens in the collection, in a jar which had lost its
label, and asked if he could identify it. He made the enigmatical remark :

If that heart had not petered out when it did, in all probability I would
not be where I am now.’ It was Drake’s

Aet. 25 The Young Professor 131

work up as far as possible the subject in its practical bearing, inject-
ing, &c. I should think any of the Demonstrators at Wien would
be only too glad for a ^ consideration ’ to put you up to all the
latest methods and old Hyrtl’s museum would be worth going over
carefully. Could you not send Fenwick a paper — or letter — on
‘ Anatomy at Vienna It would take well if you did. You are
lucky in having had warning and time to prepare, & not taken
short as I was. ... I called at your house this morning to tell the
news, but only found your sisters at home, 8c they as you may
suppose were very glad to hear it. It seems to give very general
satisfaction to all and no doubt it will to you for of course it is
only a stepping stone to other appointments. I am going to pickle
some brains for my own use this Summer & will try to get some
for you also. It would come useful if you had a course on the Micro-
scope as well 8c if you return to London by the end of June,
Klein of the Brown Institution is the man to go to, but I dare say
one of Brucke’s assistants in Vienna has good courses always in
progress. Have you seen Hyrtl’s ^ Handbuch der praktischen
Zergliederungs Kunst ’ ? Dr. Campbell has resigned the chair of
Surgery but remains as Dean of the Faculty. Fenwick succeeds him
and Roddick gets Clinical Surgery. The Dean still retains active
connection with the school and will preside at meetings, &c. He
goes home to Europe for next Winter. Browne has taken Ross’s
house (Craik’s old one) 8c should do well at the corner. I do not
know where to go ; rooms are so difficult to get. . . .

Though Joseph Hyrtl tvas, and will always remain, one
of the brilliant figures of medical history, and though his
manual of dissection was a classic to put in a class with
Virchow’s post-mortem manual, it is nevertheless interest-
ing at this early day to find Osier referring others to impor-
tant books, even to those which did not happen to be in
his special field. He not only read widely and voraciously,
but had already started at this time a Journal Club for the
purchase and distribution of periodicals to which he could
ill afford to subscribe as an individual. Into this club were
drawn Buller, Shepherd, Fenwick, Drake, Howard, Ross,
Cline, MacDonnell, and Godfrey, each of whom ^ chipped-
in ’ ten dollars for the purchase particularly of the French
and German journals. The first instalment was ordered on
April 13, 1875, and Osier kept a list of their reception and
distribution. Most of the excellent abstracts, contributed
to the local medical journal of which Fenwick and Ross
were editors, were doubtless supplied by the members of

132 McGill University Ma7 1875

thisr club, the pen of the secretary-and-treasurer being
probably the busiest.

These were happy though penurious days : for to teach
physiology and histology, the subjects comprised by the
^ Institutes of Medicine ^ as he thought they should be
taught, meant drawing heavily on his small income. The
students as he subsequently wrote, ^ paid fees directly to
the instructors, who provided equipment and material and
lived on the balance. I did more of the former and less of
the latter. The supply of microscopes was meagre, and
after remedying this defect there w^as little left in my
pockets.’ Indeed he had often to go to Palmer Howard to
borrow cash to meet his day’s expenses, and as he quaintly
expressed it in later years : ^ I suffered at that time from
an acute attack of chronic impecuniosity.’

To F,J, Shepherd from W, 0 , No. 20 Radegonde St.,

May 28th [1875].

My dear Shepherd, Your letter came to hand yesterday. I can
very well understand your hesitation in accepting the Demon-
stratorship for I have felt the same thing myself. You will get over
that, and should too, for remember what advantages you have had
and are having. You will come to your work better prepared than
any Demonstrator McGill has had for many a year. When had
Roddick dissected last on his accepting it ? probably in his third year.
I wish I was with you in Wien just now. Everybody says it is so
enjoyable there in the spring months. I suppose you will bring
a Hartnack microscope out with you when you come ; it will be
useful. Do you return by way of Paris ? If so I wish you would call
at his place No. i Rue Bonaparte and see what condition the Micro-
scopes I have ordered are in, I ordered 12 & want them out before
the session begins so that you may perhaps hurry him up a little.
I want you to get me the Photos of the following men — that place
in the Graben is the best. Hyrtl, Hebra, Bamberger, Skoda, Oppolzer
— (dead but photo extant), Jager, Billroth, Strieker, Rokitansky —
(who is his successor, by the way? Is it Recklinghausen, if so one
of his also) — one in any case, no matter who — Carl Braun, Briicke fa).
Also a set of those cheap photos of the City (Cartes). Could you
also get a Strickers simple warm stage. They are made by Kuntz,
I believe, but Schenck could tell you about them. They are about
6-8 guelden, I want badly some back numbers of the Arch, fur
Heilk. but it will pay me better to go to Boston and consult them
than buy the whole set. I have a number of cases of purpura in
smallpox $c am preparing a paper on the subject. Take a note

Aet. 25 Ordering the Microscopes 133

of anything you may hear or see upon the subject. I may want
a treatise or two, but if so will write you by next mail. I shah,
deposit some cash to your credit at your brothers office. We are
getting a little nice weather at last, but things as yet are very back-
ward. Browne is doing very well in his large house. Practice is
dull — never has been brisk. O.C.E. is in much the same state, but
unfortunately has not a College and Hospital to butter his bread.
Your people have been very kind indeed to me. I was at Como on
the 24th with your brother & spent a very pleasant day. Let me
know when you are to be in London.

The twelve microscopes which he had ordered for his
class were made possible, as will be seen, by a small salary
which he was given for undertaking a disagreeable and, it
may be added, a dangerous task. It was, however, an
entering wedge to get clinical opportunities, which he
promptly drove home. For it is evident from the letter of
March 4th from Johnson, as well as from this one to Shepherd,
that he was already at work in the smallpox wards, and it is
characteristic of him that he immediately began to make
profit out of the clinical and pathological material the
position offered for purposes of publication. The Montreal
General in the 1870’s was a modest institution of only
about 150 beds, ill-lighted and ill-ventilated. The mob-
capped nurses were then of the Sarah Gamp type, who, as
Dr. Shepherd recalls, were not strangers to the cup that
more than cheers, and it was long before modern wards and
the modern type of nurse came to supplant the old order.
Attached to the hospital, with quarters worst of aU, was
an isolated smallpox ward, in which it was the custom,
apparently, for members of the attending staff to serve suc-
cessively for periods of three months. In this year of 1875
smallpox of a particularly malignant form was rife, and early
in the year Osier’s offer to take the service had been accepted,
though at the time he was merely a volunteer worker in the
dead-house, and not a member of the hospital staff.

Smallpox, at this period more or less epidemic every-
where, was particularly severe in most seaport towns.
Vaccination was not compulsory, revaccination was rare,
and quarantine most infrequent. There had been a succes-
sion of editorials and protests in the Montreal journals over
the existing conditions ; and the ‘ M. G. H.’ had long

134 McGill University Summer 1875

made efforts to have revoked the existing law which obli-
gated all hospitals receiving grants from the legislature to
accept smallpox patientsd The contagion on several
occasions had spread from the isolation ward to other
parts of the hospital, with the forfeiture of the lives of
people who had been admitted for minor complaints ; and
finally, Peter Redpath, then President of the Hospital
Board, made an appeal through the lay press in which he
quoted from the Report of the Boston City Hospital to the
effect that not a single case of smallpox had appeared in
Boston during the preceding twelve months owing to their
proper city care, whereas in the poorly segregated wards at
the Montreal General Hospital there were always more than
one hundred cases at a time.

It is quite possible that one influence which led Osier to
volunteer for the position was his interest in skin diseases,
which during his sojourn in London had been aroused by
Tilbury Fox, for otherwise it certainly was not a service
which he would have courted. However, it was his first
chance to have hospital patients under his control, and we
may imagine with what enthusiasm he went to work. His
first publication from these wards was the report in July
1875 of a case of scarlatina which had appeared in a woman
convalescing from smallpox, and at the end of the report
he admits with frankness that he might possibly have
conveyed the contagion himself.^ If he had wished for an
active service, as he probably did, he could not have struck
a better time, for the epidemic, though not so severe as
that of 1885-6, was at its height during this summer. In
August another editorial appeared in the local journal,
which stated : ‘ The smallpox wards of the Montreal
General Hospital must be removed or else the hospital will
be ruined as a general hospital.’ And in September of this
year there was an anti-vaccination riot, during which the
house of one of the medical health officers was gutted.
Meanwhile, undistracted by all this agitation. Osier was
using his opportunities to the fuU, for the service put

^ Cf. the Canada Medual and Surgical Journal for 1873-4.

^ ‘ Case of Scarlatina Milians.’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal,
July I, 1875, iv. 49.

Aet. 26

The Smallpox Ward 13^

post-mortem material under his control, and from 'this
source were drawn several of the reports, like that ‘ On the
Pathology of Miner’s Lung ’, presented during the subse-
queiit months before the Medico-Chirurgical Society. This
particular report ^ was an admirable article dealing with
the experimental pathology of anthracosis, in which he
became greatly interested, and for which he made the
drawings accompanying the text. Other papers, of less
moment, followed during the course of the year — on the
pathology of smallpox ; on the development of vaccine
pustules — but more important were his two articles on
the initial rashes and on the haemorrhagic form of small-
pox, the most virulent type of the disease known since
the beginning of the century. In this latter article he
says :

The epidemic which has raged in this city for the past five years
has been remarkable for the prevalence of this variety of the disease ;
and the present paper is based on 27 cases, 14 of which came under
my own observation, chiefly at the General Hospital, while the
remaining 13 were under the care of my predecessor. Dr. Simpson,
to whose kindness I am indebted for permission to utilize them. . . .
In the smallpox department of the Montreal General Hospital there
were admitted from Dec. 14, 1873, to July 21, 1875, one year and
seven months, 260 cases. Of these 24 died of the variety under
discussion, or 9 23 per cent.^

As an example not only of his kindness of heart but also
of how strangely people’s paths may cross in this world,
a story of this period may be told. He had joined his first
club this autumn of 1875, the Metropolitan, where he was
accustomed to dine, and as he was often alone he occasionally
sat with an attractive young Englishman who chanced to be
in Montreal on business and who had been put up at the
club. One evening, observing that he appeared ill. Osier
questioned him, and suspicious of the symptoms, got him
to his rooms and to bed, where it was soon evident that he
had malignant smallpox. The disease proved fatal after
an illness of three days, and having learned the young

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, 1876, iv. 145.

^ ‘ Haemorrhagic Smallpox.’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal,
Jan. 1877, V. 288, 301.

136 McGill University Oct. 1875

matf s name and the address of his father in England, he
wrote :

f 0 Mr, N from W, 0 . 20 Radegonde St., Montreal.

My dear Sir, — No doubt before this, the sorrowful intelligence
of your son’s death has reached you, and now, when the first shock
has perhaps to a slight extent passed away, some further particulars
of his last illness may be satisfactory. On the evening of Thurs-
day 22nd, & on the following day, I discovered unmistakable
evidence of the nature of his disease. On Saturday in consultation
with Dr. Howard — the leading practitioner of our city, his removal
to the smallpox Hospital was decided upon. I secured a private
ward & took him there in the evening.

Even at this date was seen the serious nature of the case, 6c
I sent for Mr. Wood at his request. At 10 p.m. I found him with
your son, 6c we left him tolerably comfortable for the night. He
was easier on Sunday morning, but well aware of his dangerous
state. He spoke to me of his home, 6c his mother, and asked me
to read the 43rd chapter of Isaiah, which she had marked in his
Bible. I spent the greater part of the morning talking and reading
with him. Mr. Wood called in 3 or 4 times during the day, 6c at
9.30 p.m. I found him there again. Mr. Norman had also been
in just previously. He was still sensible 6c requested to see
Dr. Howard again, in consultation with Dr. Simpson, the attending
Physician to the smallpox Hospital. After ii o’clock he began to
sink rapidly, 6c asked me not to leave him. He did not speak much,
but turned round at intervals to see if I were still by him. About
12 o’clock I heard him muttering some prayers, but could not catch
distinctly what they were — God the Father, Son and Spirit.’
Shortly after this he turned round and held out his hand, which
I took, 6c he said quite plainly, ^ Oh thanks ’. These were the last
words the poor fellow spoke. From 12.30 he was unconscious, and
at 1.25 a.m. passed away, without a groan or struggle. As the son
of a clergyman 6c knowing well what it is to be a ‘ stranger in a
strange land’ I performed the last office of Christian friendship
I could, 6c read the Commendatory Prayer at his departure.

Such my dear sir, as briefly as I can give them are the facts relating
to your son’s death.

Thirty years almost to the day after this letter was
written, the newly appointed Regius Professor of Medicine

in Oxford chanced to meet at dinner a Lady S , who,

attracted by his name, said that she once had a young
brother who had gone out to Montreal and been cared for
during a fatal illness by a doctor named Osier, who had
sent a sympathetic letter that had been the greatest possible

Aet. 26 Clinical Microscopy 1 3 7

solace to her parents : that her mother, who was still living
in the south of England, had always hoped she might see
and talk with the man who had written it. Later, on his
way to Cornwall, Osier paM a visit to this bereaved mother,
taMng with him a photograph of her boy’s grave, which he
had sent to Montreal to obtain.

School had opened the first of October, with many
changes in the Faculty, and the ‘ Introductory Remarks ’
of the newly appointed Professor of the Institutes of
Medicine were duly published.^ He said in part :

... In this spirit [of reforms in medical teaching] the course you
are about to begin has been inaugurated. An opportunity will
henceforth be afforded to the students attending this School of
becoming practically acquainted with the use of the microscope in
physiology and pathology ; and I may venture to congratulate
McGiU College as the first in this country to offer such a course,
and in so doing to be the first to conform in all respects to the
requirements of the College of Surgeons of England which demand
that such shall be provided. . . . The first essential in a course like
this is a proper supply of good microscopes, every student must be
furnished with one to enable him to follow out the demonstrations
with any degree of satisfaction. These have been obtained from
Dr. Hartnack of Paris and Potsdam, and are the same as are in use
in the chief laboratories of Europe. . . .

He concluded with the hope that the course, thus newly
inaugurated, contained merely a promise of stiU better
things — a properly equipped physiological laboratory to be
under the superintendence of a well-trained assistant. One
thing he failed to mention, namely from what windfall
Dr. Hartnack of Paris and Potsdam was some day to receive
payment for the instruments ordered the preceding April.
Apparently in this same month Osier changed his rooms
from Radegonde Street, opposite the old Haymarket, and
moved up to 26 Beaver Hall Hill, where he took quarters
from a man who from his looks was known on the streets
as ‘ Don Quixote ’, but with whom he had some common
interest, and of whom he has left this story :

On leaving Berlin, December 1873, while ordering Virchow’s
Archiv at Reimers I saw on the desk the prospectus of Schmidt’s
Shakespeare-Lexicon, which I asked to be sent to me as soon as

Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Oct. 1875, iv. 202.

138 McGill University Oct. 1875

published. In October 1875 I moved from Victoria Square up
Beaver Hall Hill to rooms with Mr. King an Englishman, employed
in the Custom House, who had but one thought in life — Shakespeare.
He had an excellent library in which I very often spent a pleasant
hour. He was a dear old man, much esteemed, and always ready to
spend more than he could afford on his hobby. One afternoon at
the College, just before my lecture, the postman left on the table
a parcel from Reimers and to my delight it was Schmidt’s Concor-
dance, which had really been forgotten. My first thought was :
" How happy Mr. King will be to see it.’ I looked at it hurriedly,
but with much anticipatory pleasure. On my return to the house,
Mr. King who had just come in, was sitting by the fire and greeted
me in his cheery way with : ‘ What ’s that you’ve got ? ’ ^ Some-
thing that will rejoice your heart,’ I said, and deposited the work
in his lap. The shock of the realization of a life-long dream —
a complete concordance of Shakespeare, seemed to daze the old
man. He had no further interest in me and not a word did he say.
I never again saw my Schmidt’s Concordance ! For months he
avoided me, but helping him one day on the stairs, my manner
showed that Schmidt was forgotten, and he never referred to it
again. The work went to McGill College with his Shakespeare
collection. When in the Library in 1912 1 asked for the first edition of
Schmidt and was glad to see my book again after nearly forty years.
This story is written on the fly-leaf as a warning to bibliomaniacs ! ^

In October Father Johnson paid to Osier a long-deferred
visit, which must have served to clear up some of his
misgivings regarding his favourite pupiFs supposed unortho-
doxy. However, a subsequent letter to his son shows that
Principal Dawson^s views on life, past, present, and future,
had at least been too much for him. He evidently stayed
with the Francis cousins, at whose house Osier and his
friends were constant visitors ; and he appears to have
carried home with him from Montreal one of the precious
Hartnack microscopes.

From Johnson to W. O. The Parsonage, Weston,

19 Oct. 1875.

My dear Osier, — I enclose my cheque. My bad business habits
made me delay longer than I ought. I find the instrument aU I could
wish. Ha.ve not adjusted the polarizing prism yet, but when Potter
receives his consignment in all probability he will have one to imitate,
& then I will send mine. My thoughts often return to you Sc your
surroundings. I am very glad I went to Montreal. I enjoy a capa-

^ Introduction to ‘ Bibliotheca Oslenana

Aet. 26 Geologists and Theology 139

bility of thinking of you all and understanding what you are doing,
which I could not before. Moreover I added greatly to my friends.
Your cousin Mrs. F. is a good soul : fortunate for you young man to
have such a relation. ^ Her hints shew meaning, her allusions care.’ . . .
Do, if you think of it some day, tell her how much I esteem her kind
hospitality. I shall long remember it. I did not go to Montreal
expecting acceptance of my person in any way. Accustomed to be
looked upon as an extreme man such kindness confused me, rather
than otherwise. It has taught me a lesson, which I am always
practising, but have still been erring in (viz) not to judge of other
people at all. Mr. Wood, too, I remember with much pleasure and
can communicate freely with now if necessary. The scientific men
also. Principal Dawson and Mr. Whiteve [ ?]. Could you not beg
a bit of Eozoon Cana® from him for me to grind. Might I venture
to write him a line. I want to know about his sporangites, they are
very curious. Your high power shews spines on them clearly. I want
to know if he has written anything 4n re ’ & where. I am ashamed
to trouble him and ashamed also to remain in ignorance. The
specimens you gave me are quite a treat. They got home all right. If
you are acquainted with a botanist in M. ask him to name the three
ferns we found on the mountain, the small one, the middle sized
(both left with M^® F.) and the large one. You will be glad to hear
I am much better of my trip. I was not well all summer before
I went away. My love to Jimmie when you see him. Remember me
most kindly & thankfully to M’^® F., & with best wishes for yourself
spiritually & temporally, believe me.

Ever your very affectionate friend,
W, A, Johnson.

However much Johnson may have longed to get at
Principal Dawson^s sporangites, in a letter written a few
days later to his son he expresses little regard for his
writings, particularly his ^ Earth and Man ‘ Doubtless
he is a good geologist [he adds] and knows fossils, but
his reasonings, particularly his religious interminglings, are
worse than useless. It is to be lamented that allGeologists do
not at once give up observations on Theology.’ There was
much more of this ; but what is of greater importance just
now is a fact mentioned in the letter, that his recent hostess,
Mrs. Francis, had come down with a prolonged febrile
attack. Of this illness Osier keeps her sister informed :

To Miss Jennette Osier from W, 0. Tuesday.

Dear Janet, Marian continues but poorly, but nothing definite
can yet be said of the nature of her illness. Fever is the chief symptom,

140 McGill University Oct. 1875

tliough it has never yet been high. She is easier than she was 8c
takes plenty of beef- tea and milk. Her spirits are good. If it is to be
Typhoid it will in all likelihood be a very mild case. Howard is looking
after her with me 8c tomorrow if any decision is arrived at & you
are wanted I shall telegraph. The children keep well. Beelzebub is
Beelzebub, and if for nothing else than to restrain his iniquities your
presence would be acceptable. Gwyn is beginning to talk quite
nicely and says ‘ Ope ’ ‘ Yes ’ and ‘ More the latter word especially ;
the daughter of the horseleech could not have been more insatiable.

I look after Marian at night, running up & down at intervals, 8c
taking a nap on the chair or couch. She is a good patient and no
trouble. ... I hope you received my letter of Sunday. I should have
written yesterday, but had a hard day and neglected it till too late.
Love to all. Yours 8cc Willie.

The recipient of this note, Osier’s favourite cousin, was
not a person to hesitate on receiving such news, and on
hearing that her sister Marian® was really ill, and realizing
that she could be of use, she packed up instanter and left
Toronto to join the Francis household, where, as she adds,
she stayed for the next sixteen years. She has given this
note of W. O.’s relation to the household :

While we were living in Montreal Willie was a frequent visitor,
especially during his later student years and his professorship. We
were then living on McGill College Avenue and he would look in
almost every afternoon for 5 o’clock tea with Marian and the baby
and dowager baby — successively Brick, Willie, Gwen and Bea — this
explains the interest and affection he has always shown for them —
not so much for Brick who was always my special boy and who

usually preferred to stay with me and the other elder childrem He^

was like a breezy boy when not at work, would leap over the dining-
table, dance, play tricks on the elder children, join in the rough-and-
tumble pranks of the boys, sing, toss the babies (of which there was
an unfailing supply) and pet and comfort the little girls and any
small invalid. He was my dearest friend as well as cousin ; we
studied German together for a time, but the children left me little
leisure or quiet and he very soon distanced me. He was the Well-
beloved of the whole family and Willie F. adored him from his
babyhood. He went regularly to church (St. John the Evangelist)
and spoke of things religious with unfailing reverence.

Reference has been made to his interest in old people,
but this was more than equalled by his devotion to children,
with whom he had the rare gift of putting himself immedi-
ately on terms of intimate familiarity. On first acquaintance

Aet. 26 Activating the ‘ Medico-Chi.’ 141

he would coin unforgettable nicknames for them ; one with
curly hair and another with wide-open eyes remained
always as ‘ Bedsprings ’ and ‘ Owl’s Eyes He appreciated,
too, a child’s delight in repetition, so that vaulting the
dining-room table at the Francis’s was always demanded of
him ; and his pranks with children, some of which became
proverbial, will in time be referred to. But all his life he
was a great hand to drop in upon people informally for
brief visits — all too brief for their recipients. In an article
written long afterwards, in which he had occasion to speak
of the malady that affected his friend and colleague, George
Ross, he says ; ‘ As a young man in Montreal there were
two doors I never passed — 47 and 49 Union Avenue : going
up I called on Dr. Palmer Howard, and if he was not in or
was engaged I called on Dr. George Ross ; going down, the
reverse. Any growth in virtue as a practical clinician I owe
to an intimate association with these two men, in whom
were combined in rare measure enthusiasm and clear vision.’^

With his advent successively in Montreal, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Oxford, a period of unusual activity of
medical societies, of student gatherings, and of literary
production immediately set in, largely from the example of
his own whole-hearted participation and his unusual popu-
larity. Soon after his return to Montreal in 1874 he had
taken an active part in revivifying the old Medico-Chirur-
gical Society ; was immediately put on the Programme
Committee with Roddick and Gardner ; and for the
succeeding ten years was a regular attendant at the monthly
meetings. Most of the clinical papers emanating from the
Montreal General were first presented before this society,
and there was hardly a meeting * in which he did not
participate in some way or another. Until the time of his
own appointment on the hospital staff, even the brief
clinical papers, medical or surgical, written by others, were
usually supplemented by a pathological note, ‘ By Dr. Wm.
Osier’, describing the tissues — a note which often contained,
it may be added, the only portion of the communication
at all original. It was a new thing for the profession to

^ Canadian Medical Association Journal^ Oct. 1911, i. 919.

^ Cf. records of these meetings m the Canada Medical and Surgical
Journal^ 1874-84.

142 A Smallpox Infection Autumn 1875

have' a histological pathologist in their midst. Easily
enthused himself by every novel condition, he infected all
others with whom he came in contact with something of
the same spirit, and as he worked for work’s sake alone and
cared more for giving others credit than for what he might
gain, his reputation spread widely, and soon went beyond
his own community.

Another trait which had much to do with his develop-
ment was his utter lack of Chauvinism. Though at this
time there was much less inter-communication between
men of different schools in different localities, he took an
early opportunity to run down to Boston and to familiarize
himself with its medical traditions. There he not only
looked up all his old Vienna friends, but invaded the Boston
Medical Library, then in its original humble quarters,
where he found a hard-working librarian. Dr. Brigham,
little accustomed to have this kind of sunshine invade his
seclusion. The charm of the visitor was never forgotten,
nor did Osier on his part fail, as will be seen, to remember
this chance acquaintance in the years to follow. He must
have paid a call also at this time on Henry I. Bowditch,
the leader of the Boston profession, whom with reason he
greatly admired. There remains a bound pamphlet in
Osier’s library (Bowditch’s ‘ Consumption in New England’,
1862) in which he has written ; ‘ Henry I. Bowditch was
one of the finest characters I have ever met in the profession,
with the true fire. I valued his friendship highly. I met
him in 1875, and he introduced me to his nephew H.P.B.
who became one of my dearest friends.’ ^

But with all this, it must not be forgotten that he had
been hard at work in the smallpox wards, supposedly an
immune, for though repeatedly vaccinated he had never
had a successful ‘ take ’, and it is evident that meanwhile
he mingled freely with friends and relatives. It was in
this month of December, as near as can be told, that he
came down with the disease himself, and in years to come
he always cited his own case to illustrate the fallacy of the
‘ non-take ’ belief as an evidence of immunity which pre-
vailed at that time.

^ Cf. foot-note, Vol. II, p. 133.

CHAPTER VII
1876-7

THE PATHOLOGIST

After prolonged agitation a community smallpox hospital
was finally provided for Montreal early in 1876, and it is
probable that Osier was the last to take charge of this
dangerous service at the Montreal General. His own
attack, contracted the preceding month, proved luckily to
be a mild one, as shown by the following note to Arthur

Jarvis, one of his old schoolmates :

Jan [1876].

My dear Arthur, I have just received your very kind letter and
am happy to be able to write in return that I am completely con-
valescent. My attack was a wonderfully light one the pustules
numbering sixteen, all told, and of these only two located themselves
on my face ; so that ‘ my beauty has not consumed away ’. I have
been out of Hospital now a week and am regaining my strength
rapidly. The disease has been and is very bad. You need not be
afraid of this letter. I will disinfect it before sending. Ever your

aff. friend W. O.

The smallpox ward, nevertheless, not only had given him
a chance to show his worth as a hospital attendant, but the
remuneration of $600 for his services proved a boon which
enabled him to meet the obligation entered into the pre-
ceding April — ‘ In account with Hartnack, Paris. A batch
of 15 microscopes. Net price frs. 2107.50.’ His 1876
account-book shows a scarcity of entries : consultations,
few and far between, and an occasional group of house
visits are noted, with ‘ Howard laid up ’ written opposite
them as an apologia. He was stiU in his small room on
Beaver Hall Hill at a rent of $10 a month, boarding mean-
while elsewhere at another $20, with the occasional variation
of a dinner with Arthur Browne at ‘ the Terrapin ’ on
St. James Street. His income for the year, of $1178,
including his professorial salary, tells its own story.

In February of this year he gave the Somerville Lecture
before the Natural History Society, on ‘ Animal Parasites

144 Pathologist Feb. 1876

and * their Relation to Public Health V a topic which
indicates two other sources of his activity in Montreal — ^his
naturalistic and his public-health interests. This lecture also
serves to illustrate his accumulative method of assembling
material for the purpose of publication, for the subject
of trichinosis on which he chiefly dwelt dates back, as has
been seen, to notes and experiments made while a student
in the dissecting-room in Toronto. In the 1873 note-book
kept in Berlin, where he had seen a case in Traube’s clinic,
he had jotted dowa : ‘ So far as I can learn only four or
five cases of Trichinosis have occurred in Canada, one in
Montreal, three in Hamilton, and two cases in which I dis-
covered the parasite post-mortem in Toronto. Others may
and probably have occurred, but have been mistaken for
something else.’ The disease at this time was little known
in spite of Owen’s and of Paget’s early descriptions of the
parasite ; and in his paper which he sent to Toronto for
publication by his friend Zimmerman, then corresponding
editor of the Canadian Journal of Medical Science, he
reviewed the subject in general, gave his own experiences,
and recorded the experiments he had performed in Toronto,
to which reference has already been made.

He had been elected a member of the Natural History
Society, on October 26, 1874, been put on the Library
Committee in the following May, and had just been chosen
as a member of the Council. Moreover, it is apparent that
at this time he looked upon his medical work more or less
from the standpoint of a naturalist, with the microscope
always ready at hand ; and some younger members of the
society soon formed a junior body of a combined scientific
and social character — ^the Microscopical Club, whose meet-
ings were held at the residences of the members in turn.
Of this he was made the first President. The Natural
History Society itself was an active body whose transactions
and papers appeared in a quarterly journal of science.
The Canadian Naturalist. Principal Dawson, as previously
stated, was for some years its President, and though papers
presented before it represented work in many different

^ ‘Trichina Spiralis.’ Canadian Journal of Medical Science, 1876, i. 134
et seq.

Aet. 26 The Natural History Society 145

fields into which natural science has since become greatly
subdivided through specialization, there must nevertheless
have been much to interest Osier, and it is probable that
with regularity he attended the meetings. Though one
might have thought that his early biological pursuits
would have been superseded by this time, they continued
to occupy some of his working hours throughout his
Montreal period.

Though Osier’s specimens treasured in the McGill
Pathological Museum testify to his industry as a collector,
it does not appear that he was particularly interested in
the Museum of the Natural History Society itself, which
Samuel Butler, who visited Montreal at this time, described
in his famous ^ Psalm of Montreal This place, indeed, one
may assume to have been not unlike those in which most
natural-history collections of the period were housed,
Butler having found the custodian engaged in stuffing an
owl in a room to which the Discobolus had been banished :

And I turned to the man of skins and said unto him, ^ O thou man
of skins,

Wherefore hast thou done thus to shame the beauty of the Dis-
cobolus ? ’

But the Lord had hardened the heart of the man of skins

And he answered, ‘ My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr.
Spurgeon.’

O God ! O Montreal ’

‘ The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar.

He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs ;

I, Sir, am a person of most respectable connections —

My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon.’

O God ! O Montreal ’

It had been a time-honoured custom at the Montreal
General Hospital for each member of the medical staff to
make the post-mortem examinations on his own patients,
but on May ist of this year a new position of Pathologist
to the hospital was created, as far as can be judged, to make
proper use of William Osier, and in the autopsy-room of
that institution he laid the foundation of his subsequent
brilliant career as a clinician. A three-months’ summer
session for students was offered this year, beginning the

2923.1 L

146 The Pathologist Summer 1876

first of May, ‘ with opportunities afforded in the M. G. H.
wards and the prospectus, after stating that Ross, Roddick,
Gardner, Buller, and Girdwood were to be the participants,
goes on to say : ‘ And last, though not least, we have
Dr. Osier who is an enthusiast in his department, who will
give a course of twenty-five lessons in Practical Histology,
and also a course of Practical Pathological Demonstrations
in the post-mortem room.’

It was during this summer, therefore, that he began his
more serious studies as a morbid anatomist, which were to
continue almost without interruption for the next thirteen
years — until he went to the Johns Hopkins. He had, of
course, been greatly influenced by Howard, who fully
realized the importance for the successful clinician of
making his own post-mortem examinations ; he had been
still more influenced during his brief sojourn in Berlin by
Virchow ; and his familiarity with the microscope, unusual
for the time, made him easily excel his fellows in modern
methods, permitting the minute study of the processes of
disease. But aside from all this, in unravelling the mysteries
of a fatal malady he felt the same profound fascination that
had kept Bichat, Laennec, and many other brilliant and
industrious young men for years at the autopsy-table.

His industry became proverbial. Though he went through
the form of dictating notes to student assistants in his course,
when it came to completing the report it was set down in
detail in his own hand. The three large quarto volumes in
Montreal of these manuscript notes, with the cases numbered
and fully indexed, remain a monument to his genius — his
capacity for work. During the succeeding year, from May i,
1876, to May 1 , 1877, there were loo autopsies, fuUy worked
up. Many of the more interesting observations were from
time to time reported at the meetings of the Medico-
Chirurgical Society, and at the end of the year they were
assembled and printed in book form, representing the first
serious report of the kind from any hospital on the con-
tinent. Many of the more interesting specimens were
preserved, and form the basis of the pathological collection
in McGill, of which Dr. Maude Abbott has written so
fuUy ; and he came to know the material which passed

Aet. 27 The Autopsy Room 147

through his hands during this and succeeding years so well
that he constantly drew upon it for his later writings.

It is doubtful whether anything more than a great love
of the work led him to study this material in such detail ;
he could hardly have realized until his later years that a long
apprenticeship in the pathological laboratory always has
been and always will be the only way to reach the very
top either for surgeon or physician — the way followed by
Addison, Bright, Stokes, Paget, Fitz, and a host of others.
He had, moreover, the imaginative type of mind which
made him prompt to grasp the problem laid bare by what-
ever he touched, and vrith this visualization came the desire
to make some record thereof. It was this characteristic,
handed on in goodly measure to his pupils, that made him
(and them in turn) so prolific ; and in the end, owing to
his abundant and well chosen general reading, he acquired
a literary style admirably suited to his purposes.

It is not surprising therefore to find him reading a book
so unrelated to his subject as St. George Mivart’s ‘ Lessons
from Nature ’. Apparently he lent his own copy of this
book to Henry Howard,^ and sent another to the Parsonage
at Weston. Father Johnson in acknowledgement of its
receipt sent off a long letter, dated September 2nd, in
which he says that : ‘ After much effort (for I fear I am
very obtuse) I have managed the two first chapters. I
wanted to make myself master of them, but it has all ended
in a conviction that there is something which fits in un-
commonly with what I “ feel ” I cannot say “ know ” to
be right.’ That Mivart’s book was making an impression
is evident from a letter written a month later by Father
Johnson to his son ‘ Jimmie ’, who having graduated from
McGill in the spring, was now abroad and about to take
the same dangerous step Osier had taken. The letter
explains his misgivings, to put it mildly, regarding his former
head prefect :

. . . For my fart I am glad you went to London University, though
it is manifestly & I believe most intentionally an infidel foundation.

^ Cf. Henry Howard’s ‘ Remarks on Haeckel, See.’ before the Medico-
Chirurgical Society, Jan. 21, 1881. Canada Medtcal and Swgtcal Journal,
Mar. 1881, iz. 153.

148 The Pathologist Oct 1876

It was 'begun (I watched it), is continued, & is intended to prosper
solely by man’s ingenuity, knowledge & skill. Like the rods of the
magicians before Moses it will do great things, but in the end will
not succeed. . . . Suffice it to say if you go there you will find many
excellent opportunities you can not find elsewhere most particularly
infidel ideas. What would I give to be well versed in such ideas :
but only to disprove them in other people. Probably it is a dangerous
school for you my son. Unquestionably W. Osier shews it was so
to him : but there is no good without its evil, ^ no rose without
a thorn ’. When you know this much go, & go freely, only do not
accept as true what seems on every side to be so. Would that you
had time to read Mivarts ‘^Lessons from Nature’ & you would say
‘ woe to Darwin Huxley & Co.’ I must close. . . .

With the opening of the autumn term Osier’s course in
physiology was resumed, and he threw open to the class
the privilege of attending autopsies at the Montreal General
where his appointment now gave him a foothold. One of
his students, Dr. Beaumont Small, has given these recol-
lections of the methods he pursued :

His demonstration course in pathology was modelled upon that
of Virchow in Berlin with whom he had recently worked. The
course being optional and not yet in the curriculum it was nominally
for his class in physiology, but many of the seniors took advantage
of an opportunity that had been lacking in former years. This class
met for an hour on Saturday mornings in his lecture-room in the
college. His method was to select three or four of his class to per-
form the autopsies during the week in the Montreal General Hospital ;
from these autopsies a certain number of specimens were selected
for the Saturday clinic. Before the class met, the specimens were all
arranged on separate trays and carefully labelled. Each specimen
in turn v/as carefully discussed and all the important points clearly
indicated. At the close of each case, questions were asked for and
answered, the whole being most informal and conversational. The
facts elicited in the autopsies were carefully correlated with the
clinical histories and notes of the cases as taken in the wards. In
order that his teaching should be of the greatest value to those in
attendance he furnished each one with a written description of each
specimen, and with an epitome of the remarks which he had pre-
pared. There were always four pages and at times eight pages of
large letter size, written by himself and copied by means of a copying
machine ; there were from 30 to 40 copies required each Saturday,
so that the demand such a task made on his time must have been heavy.

Meanwhile the ^ Lessons from Nature ’ had been finished
by Father Johnson, and if he had come to read the

Aet. 27 Mivart's ‘Lessons from Nature’ 149

^ Genesis of Species ^ by the same author, one wonders
whether his reaction after all would not have been the same
as Huxley’s.^

From W. A, Johnson to W. 0 , The Parsonage, Weston,

19, 10. 76.

My dear Osier, — At last I have got through Mivart. I have been
strongly tempted to put other things aside to enjoy his thoughts.
My first feeling now is thankfulness to you for thinking of me at
all, then for the kind of book you selected, what it is & what it
leads to & what it has done respecting my former ideas. ... I must
read his ^ Genesis of Species ’ if I can find it some day. Everything
I see attests to evolution in some sense, but surely not chiefly by
natural selection. The last chapter I would rather had never been
added, Mivart’s reverence for the Church makes him claim too
much for it, at least so it seems to me. I can believe that devout
unbiased monobibhologtcal students from St. Aug. to Suarez & to
this day if they stated a formula of creation would be compelled so
to word it as to include evolution : but I do not at present believe
what Mivart seems to, that the Ch. is divinely appointed or
called to formulate truth, & science is to work up to it. He may
not mean this. I may misunderstand him ; but it seems like it.
Believing as I do, what I mean is that the book of Nature & the
book of Revelation are alike God’s books. ... I do not want to deny
him. He may be quite right ; but it does not follow as I think
Mivart tries to shew, that every formula enunciated by a Pope
must be correct because the Pope is divinely appointed for that
purpose. I wish that the last chapter had been left out.

^ ‘ For Mr. Mivart, while twitting the generality of men of science with
their ignorance of the real doctrines of his church, gave a reference to the
Jesuit theologian Suarez, the latest great representative of scholasticism, as
following St. Augustine in asserting, not direct, but derivative creation,
that is to say, evolution from primordial matter endued with certain powers.
Startled by this statement, Huxley investigated the works of the learned
Jesuits and found not only that Mr. Mivart’s reference to the Metaphysical
Disputations was not to the point, but that in the “Tractatus de opere sex
Dierum,” Suarez expressly and emphatically rejects this doctrine and repre-
hends Augustine for asserting it. By great good luck (he [Huxley] writes to
Darwin from St. Andrews) there is an excellent library here, with a good
copy of Suarez, m a dozen big folios. Among these I dived, to the great
astonishment of the librarian, and looking into them as “ the careful robin
eyes the delver’s toil ” {vtde Idylls), I carried ofi the two venerable clasped
volumes which were most promising. So I have come out in the new char-
acter of defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and upset Mivart out of the mouth
of his own prophet.’ (‘ Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his
son Leonard Huxley.’ 1900, vol. i, p. 392.)

150 The Pathologist Dec. 1876

Do like a good fellow try to make my peace with kind Francis.
I longed to be down and tried to get down to Montreal but really
it was too expensive, . . . Eveiything flat & calm here, from the
weather to the Village. If anyone is coming up send me something
interesting for the microscope. I am all alone as usual but have an
invaluable woman keeping house foi me. Yours very affectionately,

W. A. Johnson.

A tell-tale of where Osier spent his Christmas holidays
appears in an obituary note^ concerning one of his old
doctor friends who died a few months later. What others
would regard as needlessly taking trouble' he made into a
pleasure^ and a volume could be written on the subject
alone of unexpected but cherished visits when he brought
cheer and comfort to some physician who was in trouble or
laid low by illness or advancing years. In a war-time
address delivered more than forty years later he recalled
the day, and the scene, and its lesson, for the benefit of the
young Canadian medical officers — his hearers — as follows :

On Xmas afternoon, 1876, I walked up the Galt road along the
north side of the valley, and at the summit of what we called the
Mountain, turned into a beautiful oak grove, in the centre of which,
overlooking the valley was a comfortable old frame house with a wide
verandah. Here in an armchair, wrapped in his furs, was the Nestor
of the profession of the district. Dr. James Hamilton, who through
me as a conductor greets you across a century this evening. In
1818, fresh from Edinboro, he had settled in this district, at first
at Ancaster and in 1820 in West Flamboro, on this beautiful site
overlooking the valley. To the Grand River on the south and for
twenty miles on either side of the lake extended the area of his
practice. And he had had a singularly successful life, for he was
a hard-headed, good-hearted Scot, equally careful of his patients
and of his pockets. On the visits to my home, both as a student
and a young doctor, I had been in the habit of calling on the dear
old man — I have always loved old men ! — and I enjoyed hearing his
anecdotes about Edinboro in the palmy days of Monro secundus and
of his early struggles as the pioneer practitioner of the place. This
time I saw that he was hard hit, with the broad arrow on his fore-
head. He spoke pathetically of his recent losses, of which I had not
heard, and quoted the well known verse beginning, ‘ Naked came I,
&c.’ The scene made an enduring impression. The veteran after
sixty years of devoted work, beaten at last by a cruel fate. Call no
man happy till he is dead ! He had been an exceptionally prosperous

^ Canada Msdtcal and Surgical Journal^ 1877, v. 478.

Aet. 27 Comparative Pathology 1 5 1

man. One of the founders of the Canada Life, Surgeon for years,
and afterwards one of the Directors of the Great Western Railway.
The savings of a lifetime had gone in mills ! He died in March
1877.1

Whenever possible during all this time he made what
progress he could with his zoological studies, and on
January 29th his long-deferred paper on the ‘ Canadian
Fresh-water Polyzoa ’ was read before the Natural History
Society.* He refers therein, as already stated, to his
researches with Johnson in 1867, and to those a year later
when a student of botany with Professor Hincks at Trinity.
He apparently had given the paper scant preparation, for
the next day he wrote his cousin Jennette : ‘ I have been
suffering from the dire effects of procrastination and in
consequence have determined to eschew that vice forever
and aye. I had a lecture to give on Entozoa at the Veteri-
nary School on Saturday evening, which was not begun on
Friday morning. Last night I read a paper on the Fresh-
water Polyzoa at the Natural History Society, which was
prepared — well, between Saturday evening and Monday
at 7 p.m.’ One might assume that he had already spread
himself thin enough, but this letter to his cousin gives
occasion to refer to still another contact he had made. It
will be recalled that while in Toronto he was wont to visit
veterinarians in connexion with his study and tabulation of
animal parasites, and it is evident from the titles he first
uses at this time (‘ Professor of Physiology in the Veterinary
College, Montreal ’ and ‘ Vice-President of the Montreal
Veterinary Medical Association ’) that his interest in
comparative pathology was still sufficiently alive to have
induced him to ally himself with this other school.®
Accordingly on January 27th he had lectured at the

^ ‘The Future of the Medical Profession in Canada.’ 1918
(unpublished).

® This paper for some unaccountable reason was not published till five
years later in the Canadian Naturalist, 1883, x. 399-405.

® The veterinary students attended the lectures of Dawson on botany,
Girdwood on chemistry, and Osier on the ‘ institutes ’. Subsequently the
Veterinary College, which had been purely a private venture, became
officially a faculty of McGill and on Osier’s suggestion was named ‘ The
Faculty of Comparative Medicine ’.

Aet. 27 Educational Standards 153

the influence of Charles Eliot in the face of strong opposition,
sweeping changes in the matriculation requirements and in
methods of teaching were under way in the effort to ‘ fix
a standard of general education for the men who aspire to
be her graduates He was accompanied this time by Ross
and Shepherd, and they devoted themselves largely to
a detailed study of the methods of instruction in vogue in
the school. H. P. Bowditch’s course in practical physiology.
Wood’s method of teaching chemistry, the course in
pathology given by J. B. S. Jackson and his then assistant
Fitz, a demonstration in surgical anatomy by David
Cheever, sr., and a recitation in anatomy by O. W. Holmes
were all attended and commented upon in an account of
the visit subsequently written by Osier and published by
his friend Zimmerman.^ He concluded the account with
the following paragraph, and it is not without portent that
at this early age he had begun to show such an interest in
medical education and to urge its improvement :

It is a matter for surprise that some of the leading colleges in the
United States have not followed the good example of Harvard. No
doubt it would be accompanied for the first few years by a great
falling off in the number of students, and consequent diminution in
income, and this in many instances is avowedly the chief obstacle to
so desirable a step. One or two of the smaller schools have adopted
the graded system and I see by a recent American journal that the
University of Pennsylvania has decided to pursue it, though in
a modified and curtailed way. These are indications that the medical
schools in the United States are being stirred up to some sense of
the requirements and dignity of the profession they teach. It is
high time. The fact that a Canadian student after completing his
second winter session (not even passing his piimary) can go to the
University of Vermont, and I doubt not to many other institutions,
spend ten weeks and graduate, speaks for itself and shows the need
of a sweeping reform.

He must have been well aware, though he seems nowhere
to have made written reference to the fact, that at this time
elaborate plans were on foot for the establishment of a large
hospital and medical school under the provisions of the
Johns Hopkins Trust in Baltimore. Indeed two years before,

^ ‘ The Harvard School of Medicine.’ Canada Journal of Medical Science,
Toronto, Aug. 1877, 11. 274.

1 ^4 The Pathologist Summer 1877

an elaborate volume containing the plans and specifications
of the buildings which were to be erected had already been
published by John S. Billings, in which statements had
been made to the effect that this future school was to aim
at quality and not quantity, and that the ‘ seal of its
diploma should be a guarantee that its possessor is not only
a well-educated physician in the fullest sense of the word
but that he has learned to think and investigate for himself,
and is therefore prepared to undertake, without danger of
failure from not knowing how to begin, the study of some
of the many problems stiU awaiting solution ’• Thus was
a new note sounded which could hardly have failed to reach
Montreal even had not this same Dr. Billings pursued the
subject by many subsequent published notes and addresses
which were so numerous and which were sent out so broad-
cast that many people during the next few years must have
believed that the Johns Hopkins Medical School and
Hospital were already in full operation.

We have seen that Osier, soon after becoming established
in Montreal, started among his colleagues a Journal Club
for the circulation of foreign periodicals, and it was in this
spring of 1877 that through his influence the McGill
Medical Society was organized for the special benefit of the
undergraduate students. Both of these organizations were
of the same type as those he so successfully supported later
on in Baltimore. Of the students’ society Dr. Beaumont
Small has written :

Its object, as defined by himself in his opening remarks at the first
meeting on April 23, 1877, was to ‘ afford opportunities, which after
graduating you never obtain, of learning how to prepare papers and
to express your ideas correctly, while your meetings will also secure
for you a training in the difficult science of debate ’. Osier was its
first President, but all the other oflBcers were undergraduates and the
whole proceedings were in the hands of the members. Osier, how-
ever, never missed a meeting ; he joined in all discussions and
customarily closed each meeting with a general review in which he
combined much criticism and suggestion. A literary character was
often imparted to the meetings by the reading of short selections
from notable authors ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens.

During the summer session, up to July 17th, weekly
meetings of this novel society were held and on the re-

Aet. 28 A Vacation and a Patient 155

opening of the school in the autumn they were resumed
with a fortnightly interval. Indeed during the short
summer session from May to July there were a number of
supplementary and extra-curricular courses offered to the
students which were entered into with vigour and enthusi-
asm by the younger members of the Faculty : one of them,
Osier’s special course on ^ The Microscope in Medicine
which grew in later years into the regular prescribed course
in clinical microscopy now adopted by all schools, was the
most popular of all and the fee of $15 from each student
doubtless added considerably to his meagre income.

A month’s vacation later in the summer was passed at
Tadousac at the mouth of the Saguenay, where he acted as
the hotel physician, taking the place of Arthur Browne, who
having served in this capacity the year before had expected
until the last moment to return. The Governor-General,
Lord Dufferin, had his summer residence there, and as the
Government wished to have a dependable doctor near by,
one or another of the younger McGill Faculty members
volunteered for the position. The incumbent was given
his board, picked up what practice he could in the summer
colony, attended the Governor’s family in case of need, and
incidentally made pleasant acquaintances.

From W. 0 . to his cousin^ Mrs. Francis. Friday, 9 a.m.

My dear Marian, I am rapidly getting too stout for my clothes
and by the time my two weeks are out I expect to be of the build of
a friend at — n.s.w. There is absolutely nothing to do here but loaf
and eat and sleep. I have had no fishing yet but Robt. Shepherd
is coming this evening and we will go up the Saguenay together
trout -fishing. Yesterday morning was close & hot, but in the
evening a cold fog came up, making such a change. Mrs. Ogilvie
I find a pleasant little woman. I went for her last evening to the
Urquharts who have a nice house here, Mrs. Howard and her bairns
keep well, though little Muriel is rather cross & shy among the other
children. Two very agreeable American girls — Bostonians — arrived
yesterday and we have struck an acquaintance. One of them in
particular is very jolly. I had to lie, in my usual accomplished style,
when she asked me if she spoke like an American, I replied unblush-
ingly that her accent was rather like the Midland counties, and
delightfully English. The ^ vurries ’ betray her, more than anything
else. The only patient I have had was a poor French child with inf.
of lungs following whooping cough — which is very prevalent among

156 The Pathologist Sept.-Oct. 1877

the* natives. There are not many people at the Hotel, Monsig.
Conroy [ ?] arrived last night creating quite a sensation in the village.
It turns out that the Rev. Mr. Higginson — Lord DufEerin’s Tutor,
was curate at West Flamboro some i8 years ago. He saw my name
in the book and called. I have a faint recollection of him. I have
got one or two nice things for the Microscope, but there are not
many animals about. The water is fearfuUy cold. I made up my
mind for a dip this a.m. but the tide was out too far. I wish you and
Jack were here & the other chickabids. It is such a nice place for
children. . . . Love to Jennette & the chicks. Your affec coz

Willie

On the memory of an American girl whose ‘ vurries ’
betrayed her is left a lively recollection of a young man of
rare charm and gaiety, which however is not particularly
apparent in a rather devout note which she has tenderly
preserved, and which announces the sending of a little
volume to recall the pleasant memories of Tadousac, which
‘ should have been sent before, but there has been an
unavoidable delay in getting a copy, as our “Proper Lessons ”
differ from those in use in the Protestant Episcopal Church
in the United States ’.

The annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association
was held this year in Montreal, September I2th-i3th, and
as Chairman of the Committee of Arrangements he had
much on his hands. Nevertheless he took an active part in
its proceedings, gave the report on necrology, participated
in a paper on Addison’s disease with George Ross, in another
with John Bell on pernicious anaemia, and responded at the
dinner to the toast of the local profession. With the view
of assuring an annual report of the society’s activities, he
provoked a discussion which had the customary sequel of
such a suggestion, for he was promptly appointed Secretary
of a Publication Committee and in this capacity edited the
volume of ‘Transactions’ which appeared the following year.
As in most thankless tasks of this kind, things get done in
direct ratio to the activity of the Secretary, which in this
case amounted to being Chairman as well, and on Osier’s
withdrawal the next year the ‘ Transactions ’ promptly
lapsed. He had likewise been appointed Registrar of the
McGill School, and in this capacity, on October ist at the
opening of the session of 1877-8, he delivered before the

Aet. 28

The Second-floor Front

157

assembled students the customary ‘ Introductory Lecture* ’d
It was a serious and somewhat laboured effort and, for him,
a long address ; for to each class of students in turn he must
needs explain the several changes which had been made in
the curriculum with their purport and the advantages to be
derived. He bade them banish the future and live for the
hour and its allotted work, quoting again his favourite line
from Carlyle.

In this autumn of 1877 he abandoned his bookish land-
lord, the Shakespearian Mr. King, and moved into the
second-floor front room at 1351 St. Catherine Street, in
the house occupied by his colleague. Dr. Frank Fuller, who
had established himself in the ophthalmological practice
to which Osier had once aspired. They were soon joined
by two students. The first of them, E. J. A. Rogers, had
been a Weston schoolmate of Osier’s ten years before, and
had made this late resolution to study medicine. He has
written an engaging description, not only of Osier’s recogni-
tion and reception of him after the delivery of his introduc-
tory lecture, but also of his own personal feelings, a mixture
of ‘ resolute curiosity and suppressed horror ’ in being
made to participate immediately afterwards at an autopsy :

Leaving the hospital we walked back to his rooms, which I was told
were from that time on to be my headquarters. He was living with
Dr. BuUer in an ordinary built-in city house with a front and back
room on each of three floors, the back parlour on the first floor being
Buller’s consulting-room, the front room a waiting-room, used in the
morning as a breakfast-room. The second-floor front room was
Osier’s ; the other rooms were used as bedrooms. Osier said I was
to become the third member of the family. BuUer acted more
deliberately, and it was some little time before these latter rooms
were rearranged and I was given the third-floor front as my bedroom
and study. Here, until I left Montreal after my graduation, I lived
all through my studentship.

Osier never did anything by halves. From those who were willing
and ready to work with him his demands were unlimited, but for this
he more than repaid in the opportunities and good-fellowship that
he returned. I thus had every opportunity for the most intimate
knowledge of all his mental and physical activities. Soon I found
that through his whole-heartedness his friends had become my
friends, but not, of course, through any virtue of mine : his pleasures

Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, 1877, vi. 204-10.

158 The Pathologist Oct 1877

and joys he shared with all those about him, talking freely of all that
he had on hand, for in his ebullient enthusiasm he was still a school-
boy. In his course of life he was more regular and systematic than
words can tell ; in fact, it was hardly necessary, living in the house
with him, to have a timepiece of one’s own. One could tell the time
exactly by his movements from the hour of his rising at seven-thirty
until he turned out his light at eleven o’clock after an hour in bed
devoted to the reading of non-medical classics.

His cheerfulness and equanimity were surprising. He never lost an
opportunity of saying a word of cheerful encouragement. Nothing
ruffled his wonderful temper. We three had breakfast together at
eight o’clock. The only impatience I can recollect his ever showing
was when the housekeeper was a little tardy in putting our breakfast
on the table. , .

This ^ housekeeper it may be interpolated, was an
elderly Englishwoman named Cook whose husband was
a labourer of sorts. The janitor of the medical school, who
as curator of the dissecting-room came closely in contact
with the medical students, was also named Cook. This
Cook a few years later disappeared through natural causes
or otherwise, and Osier as Registrar of the school promptly
substituted the other Cook — nicknamed ^ Damphino ’ Cook
by the students — in his stead. He, and his wife who had
been housekeeper at the St. Catherine Street abode, became
well-known characters at McGill for the next two decades,
and they did much to perpetuate Oslerian traditions
among the successive generations of medical students. All
medical schools appear to have ^ trusties ’ of this kind, who
more often than not are characters of real merit and wield
actual power, of which Cook’s familiar reference to ^ Me and
the Dean ’ was significant.

Dr, Rogers has written further regarding Osier’s room
and habits :

He used the upstairs front room as his study, library, sitting-room
and consultation room. Here he did practically all of his reading
and writing. The desk, a flat office one, stood in the middle of the
room and he sat with his back towards the two windows in front.
The desk and the floor about it and also an occasional chair or stand
were always piled in apparent confusion with books and papers. It
was his habit to bring in volumes from the library and elsewhere for

^ ‘ Personal Reminiscences of the Earlier Years of Sir William Osier ’
Colorado Medtctne, April 1920.

Aet. 28 A Secondary Consideration 159

reference upon the subject at which he was working and they usually
remained convenient until the subject was disposed of. The college
library at that time had a considerable number of current books and
many bound volumes of old journals and he had taken complete
charge of it all.

This room was not arranged for, or inviting to, patients ; indeed
very few patients ever came to it. He had little desire that they
should come, for he seemed to have no inclination to take charge
of any patient. He at that time occasionally saw patients outside
in consultation with Dr. Howard and other physicians, but always
as a consultant. He had no desire for a private practice and was
amply satisfied for the time being with his income through the
college.

Patients were a secondary consideration. A consulting
practice could wait, and when access to him was finally
forced as in the later days in Baltimore, they came in such
shoals as finally to drive him away. But he was certainly
having enough to do, so much indeed as to make a necessity
of the regular habits which his house-mate Rogers has
pictured. Registrar of the school ; pathologist to the
hospital ; on the Council of the Natural History Society ;
participating in the clinical reports of many of his colleagues
by adding a pathological note usually the most important
feature of the conjoint paper ; writing papers of his own ;
the activating spirit of the Medico-Chirurgical Society ;
translating foreign medical articles for Fenwick’s journal ;
editing the Transactions of the CanadianMedical Association ;
preparing for his elaborate pathological report ; and with
all this he not only kept up with his studies on the polyzoa
but, as Dr. Rogers has stated, acted as voluntary Librarian
for the medical school, as an advertisement of the time in the
McGtll University Gazette indicates.^

^ As Osier from this time until his death continued to be actively inter-
ested in one or more libraries besides his own this advertisement from the
McGtll University Gazette^ 1S77, In. 49, deserves quoting. It reads as
follows : ' A circular has been issued by the Graduates’ Society calling
attention to the smallness of the library fund, and requesting subscriptions
from graduates, for the purpose of increasing the revenue of this most
important adjunct to an Institution like McGill. The annual revenue of
the library is now, the circular states, about $600, and with the exception
of the Redpath and Alexander collections, the books are of a miscellaneous
character. We sincerely trust that the appeal of the Society will meet with
a generous response from all interested in the college. It would not be

i6o The Pathologist Oct. 1877

But Osier was far from being a literary and laboratory
recluse, and at the proper time was as ready for play and
relaxation as any other. One opportunity for diversion was
at the gatherings of the Dinner Club which has been
mentioned. He always took a more or less detached and
non-gastronomic interest in the various dining clubs to
which he belonged, and many years later he scribbled in
pencil on the blank leaves of the publisher’s ^ dummy ’ of
some collected addresses a list of his several ^ Clubs and
Dining Clubs ’ to which is appended this note :

Though not a Club man in the usual sense of the term, many of
my happiest recollections are associated with Clubs. Not a drinker,
not a billiard player, and slow to make friends, the Club served as
an hotel. In I dined (usually with Arthur Browne) at the

Terraptn^ St. James’ Street or at the Ottawa Hotel ; afterwards
I joined the Metropolitan Club in Beaver Hall and dined there for
five or six years. We had a social club of twelve — Ross, Roddick,
Rodger, Gardner, Alloway, Buller, Browne, Blackader, Pettigrew,
Molson, and Shepherd — and dined once a month through the
winter. There are Apician memories like those of the old surveyor
in the introduction to the Scarlet Letter — mine, I confess, rarely
last from one day to another. The calendar of my life is not rubri-
cated with dinners, the sweet savour of which returns to tickle my
third ventricle. Indeed only two do so with faithful regularity
whenever I see anything specially tempting, as currant dumplings
or an old-fashioned suet pudding. One Saturday morning in the mid
sixties a long, lank parson arrived at the Rectory and announced to
father, the Rural Dean of the district, that he had come as Incumbent
of Watertown which he thought was a couple of miles away. In
reality it was twelve or fourteen and I had to ‘ hitch up ’ the buggy
and take him to the village. It was in the spring, the roads were
awful, it was cold and raining, and he was a hungry Evangelical
who persisted in bothering me about my soul. At that stage of
boyhood I had not acquired a soul, and I was scared by the very
unpleasant questions he asked. I had never had anyone attack me
in this way before, and my parents were not the type of Xtian
that could worry a growing boy with such problems. I was in

a bad idea to have every future graduate pledge himself to subscribe fifty
or one hundred dollars, within four or five years after graduation, to the
library fund. Almost every one could afford such a sum, and though incon-
siderable when viewed separately, the contributions would make a handsome
total. Let the Class of ’77, which has inaugurated so many reforms in colleges,
take the lead in this matter ’ Graduates who have not received the circular
may obtain copies by addressing Dr. Osier, 26 Beaver Hall Hill, Montreal.

Aet, 28

Clubs and Dining Clubs 16 1

despair as he had reached the stage of wishing to pray for me when
I saw a wayside tavern — clapboard, desolate-looking, but it had the
cheery sign — I see it now — John Rieman : Accommodation for Man
and Beast. It was half-past two and with the sensations of that hour
much intensified. A nice warm kitchen, and in less than 1 5 minutes
a meal fit for the gods ! — ham and eggs, a big loaf of home-made
bread — ^hot ! — a pat of butter and a pot of green tea. The parson
had a change of heart. The frying-pan was still on the stove, and
the kitchen was still hazy with the ambrosial atmosphere. We could
not resist the offer of more eggs. After more than 50 years stomach
and brain combine to remember that as the very best dinner in
their record. I delivered the Incumbent to his churchwardens and
to my great relief was not billeted that night in the same house.

The other occasion recurs neither so often nor so acutely. One
day Dr. BuUer with whom I lived in St. Catherine Street said :
‘ I am not going to have an ordinary dinner at the Club — we shall
have an oyster supper here instead.’ It was the middk of November
and the faithful Cook — remembered as ‘ me and the Dean ’ by
three generations of McGill medical students — ^was sent to the dock
for three barrels of Caraquet oysters, which in those happy days
sold at about $1 (4J.) a barrel —

Here the note abruptly ends. One could wish he had
continued, but the memory of the occasion may have
overcome him, for this particular club-meeting is recorded
as having been a rarely festive affair. The note will serve
to explain, to those who knew Osier at the table, his senti-
mental devotion to currant dumplings and a stodgy suet
pudding, on the appearance of which he invariably burst
into a Gregorian chant of exultation, keeping as nearly on
the key as his unmusical ear permitted. It is perhaps worth
noting that servants always adored him, nor did he ever
forget them : so it was to the last, and to this day the
servants at Christ Church and the Oxford Museum speak
of him with moist eyes but with a smile on their lips. His
cousin Jennette of the letters — the ^ little Auntie ^ of the
Francis children — ^writes :

My remembrance of him as a student and a young professor is of
one gifted with abounding vitality ; hard-working for the love of
work ; prompt, alert, always cheery and always kind ; thinking no evil
of anyone and refusing to listen to ill-natured gossip and censorious-
ness. Of self-conceit or boastfulness he had not a trace; he thought for
others and seemed to forget himself. The servants would gladly do
anything possible for him ; he had the happy knack of friendliness to
"^2923.1 M

i 62

The Pathologist Dec. 1877

rich and poor, young and old, learned and ignorant ; and what he was
in character as a boy and young man he continued to be throughout
his life : an out-giving, expressing nature, sympathetic and true.

The volume of pathological reports^ representing his
first year’s work as Pathologist to the ^ M. G. H.’ up to
May I, 1877, was apparently completed for the press on
December 10, 1877 — preface is so dated from
1351 St. Catherine Street. The bulk of the report had
appeared serially during the course of the year in the local
journal,^ and a large number of the more important
observations and rare cases had been reported before the
Medico-Chirurgical Society or at some other meeting, in
conjunction with the clinician who had the case in charge.^
On the title-page he quotes Wilks’s statement : ^ Pathology
is the basis of all true instruction in practical medicine ’ ;
and the volume bore this dedication :

To my Teacher
James Bovell M.D.

Emeritus Professor in Pathology in the Toronto Medical School
This first pathological report from a
Canadian Hospital

is gratefully and affectionately dedicated.

^ ‘ Montreal General Hospital Pathological Reports.’ Montreal, Dawson
Bros., 1878, 97 pp.

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, July 1877, vi. 12 et seq.

^ It is largely due to this fact that such an amazing number of titles
appear for the years 1877 and 1878 in Miss M. W. Blogg’s enlarged ‘ Biblio-
graphy ’ of his writings, issued in Baltimore 1921. A bibliographer is inter-
ested chiefly in dates and places of publication, whereas a biographer’s
concern lies with the purpose of the writing, the date and place of
preparation, and delivery (a bio-bibliography) ; and during 1877 there
were no less than forty-nine entries on this basis in his bibliography. It is
impossible to give more than a general idea regarding the character of most
of these contributions. Their chief value, as is true of the writings of most
young men, lay in the personal training which the author received thereby,
and throughout the rest of his life he continued to draw upon, and to make
reference to, his pathological observations of these early years. Some of the
studies were unquestionably important, and some of the observations original,
but he was a person who always took the greatest pains to point out priority
of observation on the part of others and rarely if ever made any claim in
this respect for himself. The more important of the studies were doubtless
those upon the anaemias, those upon aneurysms, and those on endocarditis
and valvular diseases of the heart. These three topics were ones which he
subsequently developed and wrote upon in detail.

Aet. 28 Johnson without a Doctor 163

While at home for the Christmas holidays he paid his
usual visit to Father Johnson, who was in somewhat broken
health owing to an infection received during a smallpox
epidemic in Weston. Johnson, missing Bovell greatly, had
written earlier in the year :

. . . you observe about my Lenten Services, They were more
than I can manage again. The additional work in consequence of
not having a to attend to small-pox cases made it necessary for
me to be on the go incessantly, so many saying ^ we will not keep
you a moment, but do call & tell us if so Sc so has small-pox,’ &
of course everyone thought they had it. I am still overdone but
getting well, and all you could say of me is, Oh, he is tough,
he will be well if he rests awhile, but somehow that rest awhile does
not come. I am netted up, or webbed up with these poor people,
8c they are my children in some sense, 8c without knowing it
they depend upon me for more than they know, 8c my constant
habit of being found in the Vestry leads more and more to come to
me about some trifle or other. The absence of a medical man with
a little common sense Sc fellow feeling increases my work too.
There is nothing noticeable hereabout. Prices high, war prospects
increasing. An occasional cracked skull from too much whiskey,
& on the other hand some one failing for want of a little. It is
hard to hit the happy medium. . . .

M z

CHAPTER VIII

1878-80

PHYSICIAN TO THE MONTREAL GENERAL

On January 23rd, before the Pathological Society in New
York, Osier presented the results of one of his more important
studies in the domain of comparative pathologyd He had
chanced to hit upon a most baffling epidemic disease
affecting hogs, knowledge of which at the time was most
meagre and for that matter still remains so, for it appears
to be one of those infectious disorders due to what is called
a filterable virus, that is, an organism too small for micro-
scopic observation. A trained microscopist, a keen observer
and ardent pathologist, had Osier undertaken as Pasteur did
just at this time (1877) the study of a simpler disease such
as anthrax, the causative agent of which even unstained is
easily seen in the blood when examined under the micro-
scope, he might in all possibility have been led to make
equally important discoveries. But he had come under
Bastian’s rather than Pasteur’s influence : he never really
became an adept in bacteriological technique ; and, by the
time Pasteur’s views had become accepted, had moved on
to other fields than experimental medicine and comparative
pathology — fields moreover which engrossed him completely.

Pasteur had written to Bastian in July 1877 : ‘ Do you
know why I desire so much to fight and conquer you ?
It is because you are one of the principal adepts of a medical
doctrine which I believe to be fatal to progress in the art
of healing — the doctrine of the spontaneity of all diseases.’
Naturally enough the younger generation sat back and
watched the tilting of these giants, and, until Tyndall
entered the lists on Pasteur’s side and finally Lister, English-
trained youths were naturally imbued with the ideas of
spontaneous generation, as Osier seems to have been when
he saw the blood platelets apparently transform into bacteria.

^ ‘ On the Pathology of so-called Pig Typhoid.’ Veterinary Journal and
Annals of Comparative Pathology, Lond., 1878, vi. 385. Instead of his
actual title, viz. ‘ Professor of the Institutes of Medicine he gives ‘ Professor
of Physiology and Pathology in McGill University and the Veterinary
College, Montreal.’

Aet. 28 Hog Cholera 165

This particular epidemic among hogs, which Osier urider-
took to study, had originally been regarded as a form of
anthrax, though latterly the view prevailed that it was the
counterpart in hogs of typhoid fever in man, the bacterial
origin of which was of course as yet unknown. ^ Having
in the course of my reading become acquainted with this
unsettled state of the matter,’ Osier wrote, I gladly at
Principal McEachran’s suggestion investigated a local
epizooty which had broken out near Quebec in a drove of
300 hogs, hoping that by a series of independent observations
the truth of one or the other of these views might be con-
firmed.’ And in the course of his inquiry he not only
studied the post-mortem appearances of the disease, but
peiformed a few successful experiments by transfer inocula-
tion, drawing the conclusion that the disease bore no
relation to typhoid or anthrax, but that it was dysenteric
in character though without parallel in human dysentery —
a view sustained to-day, the term ^ hog cholera ’ having been
substituted for ^ pig-typhoid ’.

At this time he was still on the council which arranged
for the meetings of the Natural History Society, and on
February 25 th under the auspices of the Microscopical Club
a students’ meeting was held at which he demonstrated
the newer methods of microscopical illumination — a further
evidence of his persistence in emphasizing the importance
of the microscope in the study of disease, though this
instrument unfortunately had not helped him greatly in
his studies of hog cholera. However, it was well suited for
investigations of the blood. So among the many patho-
logical specimens exhibited during the spring was one on
May 1 8th before the McGill students’ society whose weekly
meetings he continued to sponsor — a section of bone from
a case of pernicious anaemia with the marrow showing
nucleated red-blood corpuscles.^

^ Hi$ studies of this case formed the basis of one of his more important
contributions to the subject of the blood and concerned its formation from
the bone marrow. It was subsequently published in extenso in German
{Centralblatt f, d. med.Wissenschaften^'^tx\my]\m& 29, 1878, xvi. 465), and
was widely commented upon. (Cf. editorial. Lancet^ Lond., Aug. 3, 1878,
ii. 162.)

1 66 Physician to the Montreal General Spring 1878

He had been engaged during the early spring campaigning
for a clinical appointment in succession to Dr. Drake at the
Montreal General — and in his account-book there occurs
a long list of names and addresses of people whose support
he might count upon, for this is the custom when applicants
seek positions in British or in Canadian institutions. It was
a distasteful procedure — ^this solicitation of testimonials —
and it is little wonder that thirty years later, on his call to
Edinburgh, he flatly refused to repeat the process, contrary
to all precedent. The Board must have felt sure of their
man, for it was an appointment which not only required
vision but a certain degree of courage, qualities in which
trustees are sometimes wanting. In the first place he was
thoroughly identified as a laboratory worker in physiology
and pathology, though, to be sure, with pronounced
clinical interests and capabilities as shown during his period
in the smallpox ward. Moreover, like many other patho-
logists, he was so imbued with the futility of most of the
drugs in common use that later on he came to be termed
a therapeutic nihilist ; and fifty years ago one holding such
views was far less likely to be regarded as a suitable candidate
for a clinical position. Furthermore, he had not gone
through the usual apprenticeship as physician to out-
patients as some of the rival candidates had done. But
outweighing all this, what must have influenced the Board
of Governors was a petition from the students, who, having
taken part in the campaign, Edinburgh-fashion, warmly
favoured his candidacy. Long afterwards in his address
at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1914 he reminisced as
follows concerning this period :

Four years in the post-mortem room of the general hospital, with
clinical work during the smallpox epidemic, seemed to warrant the
Governors of the general hospital in appointing me, in 1878, full
physician, over the heads — it seems scandalous to me now — of the
assistant physicians. The day of the election I left (with my friend
George Ross) for London to take my Membership of the College of
Physicians and to work at clinical medicine. For three months we
had a delightful experience. Murchison, whom I had seen before
in 1873, was most kind and I do not think we missed one of his
hospital visits. He was a model bedside teacher — so clear in his
expositions, so thorough and painstaking with the students. My

Aet. 28 Brain-dusting with Ross 167

old friend Luther Holden introduced us to Gee, in whom .were
combined the spirit of Hippocrates and the method of Sydenham.
Fred. Roberts at Unirersity College Hospital showed us how physical
diagnosis could be taught. We rarely missed a visit with Bastian
and Ringer, and at Queen Square I began a long friendship with
that brilliant ornament of British Medicine, Gowers. With my old
comrade Stephen Mackenzie we went to Sutton’s Sunday-mormng
class at the London — his ‘ Sunday School ’ as it was called — and
we learned to have deep respect for his clinical and pathological
skill. I mention these trivial details to indicate that before beginning
work as clinic teacher I had at least seen some of the best men of
the day.^

The object of the trip, as he explains, was primarily to
pass his M.R.C.P. examination, and incidentally he wished
to brush up on his clinical work before assuming his new
position in the autumn. This ‘ quinquennial brain-dusting ’
became a habit with him and in later years similar visits
had no little influence in keeping him always in the front
rank. They visited Edinburgh, where the new Royal
Infirmary was just approaching completion, and they felt
while there that what had come to be called ‘ Listerism ’
was not making great headway even in this northern metro-
polis. They attended the conversazione of the Royal College
of Physicians, and heard Burdon Sanderson’s Harveian
Oration (June 26th) in which he urged young men to
devote themselves to research despite the promise of no
immediate reward. It was at this time that Osier first made
acquaintance with two of his lifelong friends, Seymour J.
Sharkey and George Savage. Sharkey had just returned
from a long period of study on the Continent and, having
been appointed Resident Assistant Physician at St. Thomas’s
Hospital, the position gave him practical control of the
wards during the summer months. On finding in Sharkey
a physician of their own kind. Osier and Ross took full
advantage of this opportunity.

It was in ’78 when Osier was studying in London, that I first
made his acquaintance [writes Sir George Savage]. I was then
Physician to Bethlem Royal Hospital, and I had classes for post-
graduates and for other members of the profession who were not

^ An address on ‘ The Medical Clinic, &c.’ British Medical Journal,
1914, i. 10.

1 68 Physician to the Montreal General juiy-Aug. 1878

ordinary medical students : in fact I used to have men belonging
to various professions. I used to have literary men and actors as
well as doctors, who came to study what might be called the psycho-
logical side to mental disorders. Among them was Osier. I admit
I did not at that time appreciate the strong individuality of the
man, yet I was drawn to him at once. We also were members of the
Savile Club, which was and is a London centre for scientific and
literary men. At this club there was a regular table d’hote and men
talked freely to their casual neighbours and associates. There was
a constant literary give-and-take which suited Osier very well.
The talks in the smoking-room after dinner were eminently interest-
ing and very far-ranging. Osier did not pretend to make any special
study of mental disorder, but in after-life he used to chaffingly say
that from my clinics he learned all that he knew on the subject, and
that in Canada he got a reputation which he did not deserve. Then,
as ever, he was bright and friendly with anyone and I never heard
of a man who spoke ill or unkindly of him. Years passed and we kept
up occasional correspondence, but I nevei found Osier to be what
might be called a good general letter-writei : he would in a few
words convey his meaning and did not give way to sentiment. He
was, in some lespects, rather like Gladstone in that he communicated
his wishes or his intentions by means of postcard. . . .

Osier himself mentioned the Savile Club in connexion
with the malady that carried off his dear friend Ross, the
premonitory symptoms of which first showed themselves
at this time ; ^ and to another incident of this summer’s
visit in London, he referied in an address many years after
when portraying the two types of students — the owl and
the lark ; he himself throughout his life managed to keep
a very happy mean between these two extremes, though he
does not say so :

One day, going with George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage,
at that time the physician in charge, remarked upon two great
groups of patients — those who were depressed in the morning and
those who were cheerful ; and he suggested that the spirits rose and

^ ‘ Transient Attacks of Aphasia and Paralyses in States of High Blood
Pressure and Arteriosclerosis.’ Canadian Medical Association Journal^ Oct.
1911, i. 919. It was Osier’s first experience with the condition which came
to be called Cerebral Angiospasm, and though Dr, George Peabody was the
first to call attention to the condition in a formal paper on the subject.
Osier describes it in all the editions of his Text-book ; and in a letter of
November 17, 1912, to the Lancet^ Lond., says : ‘ My knowledge of tran-
sient aphasia and monoplegia in arteriosclerosis dated from the early ’8o’s
when a dear friend and colleague had scores of attacks,’

Aet. 29 The Owl and the Lark 169

fell with the bodily temperatuie — those with very low morning
temperatures were depressed, and vice versa. This, I believe, ex-
presses a truth which may explain the extraordinary difference in
the habits of students in this matter of the time at which the best
work can be done. Outside of the asylum there are also the two
great types, the student-lark w^ho loves to see the sun rise, who comes
to breakfast with a cheerful morning face, never so ‘ fit ’ as at 6 a.m.
We all know the type. What a contrast to the student-owl with his
saturnine morning face, thoroughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched
breakfast-bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep ; no appetite,
and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to his vis-a-vis, whose
morning garrulity and good humour are equally offensive. Only
gradually, as the day wears on and his temperature rises does he
become endurable to himself and to others. But see him really
awake at lo p.m. ! While the plethoric lark is in hopeless coma ovei
his books, from which it is hard to rouse him sufficiently to get his
boots off for bed, our lean owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the
ascendant, with bright eyes and cheery face, is ready for four hours
of anything you wish — deep study, or ^ Heait affluence in discursive
talk \ and by 2 a.m. he -will undertake to unsphere the spirit of
Plato. In neither a virtue, in neither a fault ; we must recognize
these two types of students, differently constituted owing possibly
— though I have but little evidence for the belief — to thermal
peculiarities.^

They attended the meeting of the British Medical
Association, held this year at Bath, August 6th-9th, where
possibly Osier first encountered Grainger Stewart, Jonathan
Hutchinson, Clifford Allbutt, Gairdner, and William
Broadbent, who were coming to be the outstanding figures
in British medicine and w^ho subsequently became his
staunch friends. An account of the proceedings, forwarded
by Ross for publication in Fenwick^s journal, of which he was
soon to become co-editor, was dated August 12 th from
Paris, where they must also have gone for a short time,
possibly to attend the first International Congress of
Hygiene, held there during the summer. It was the year,
as may be recalled, of the yellow-fever epidemic in the
States and Osier’s public-health activities in Montreal must
have made him deeply interested. They did not get back
to Canada until too late in September to attend the annual
meeting of the ^Canadian Medical’ held in Hamilton earlier

^ ‘ The Student Life in ‘ Aequanimitas, &c.’, 2nd ed., 1906,

1 70 Physician to the Montreal General Oct. 1878

in the month. Osier was still a member of the Publication
Committee, and despite his labours of the previous year
in editing the Transactions, no one, in his absence, had
sufficient -influence to win support for their continuance ;
nor did his attempt to revive the project by a circularized
letter calling upon the co-operation of every intelligent
practitioner ’ bring in enough voluntary subscribers to
justify further publication.

His position as Registrar of the Medical School necessi-
tated his being early on his job ; and though a time-
consuming duty it brought him in contact with the entire
student body, and his unusual memory for names and faces
specially qualified him for the post. Fortunate the school
that could have such a one the first to meet its candidates
for admission, and there is hardly a McGill student of
the day who does not vividly recall his first interview.
Dr. William M. Donald writes :

When Ij a raw stripling, marched into his office to register in my
Freshman year, he gieeted my answer to his query regarding my

residence with the question : ‘ What has become of Ephraim ? ’

naming a student who lived in a small village in Ontario, which was
my home. I replied that he was not coming back to college, and
that unfortunately he had fallen into evil ways, and was drinking
somewhat heavily. Immediately he retorted : ^ Ah, Ephraim is
joined to his idols.’ I smiled, remembering my reading of the
prophet Hosea, and came back at him with the quotation from the
Second Epistle of Peter : ^ The dog has returned to his vomit and
the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.’ Osier
smiled and replied : ^ Good Scripture, Donald, but rough Anglo-
^ Saxon.’ I always felt that there was a somewhat closer bond between
us after this on account of our mutual knowledge of the Book of
Books.

Another student of the day has written :

, . , There was, too, a most engaging lightness and aliveness about
him, and a friendliness that we undergraduates rather took for
granted, not realizing at the time how virtually unique it was, in
sincerity, helpfulness and lastingness. His very walk, ^ light-hearted,
spring-heeled ’ (that ’s R.L.S., isn’t it ?) showed both the tempera-
ment and the youth. One often met him walking with books or
papers under his arm, ^ and with him, generally foreshadowed in
a smile, came the greeting, always cheery and always the right one
for the occasion, the place and the persons. This was entirely

Aet. 29 Laboratory and Bedside 171

instinctive and yet so noticeable that more than once it provoked
the remark that he was among us but not of us Beyond that no
one in Montreal, at least no one of us students in medicine, ever
had so much as a glimpse of W. O.’s bright and shining place in the
future medical world.

In his introductory lecture to the students on the re-
opening of the school, October ist,^ William Gardner made
the following statement :

I have to announce to you that this Faculty congratulate them-
selves on a most important step they have taken, in providing the
means for the practical teaching of an all-important subject. For
some years the Faculty have contemplated establishing a Physio-
logical Laboratory. To-day I am proud to announce to you that
that Laboratory is an accomplished fact. Under the able direction
of my friend Prof. Osier we expect that this very laboratoiy shall be
the scene of many original researches by present and future students
of McGill in the unexplored fields of physiology.

Despite this ^ important step ’ which for the first time
gave the budding Department of Physiology an opportunity
for development, it was not as an experimental biologist
that Osier’s particular bent showed itself. Of this he made
repeated confessions in years to follow. But it was quite
another matter when he came to enter the hospital wards
as an attending physician, as he did this autumn. His
belief that over-treatment with drugs was one of the medical
errors of the day has been hinted at, and it was always one
of his favourite axioms that no one individual had done
more good to the medical profession than Hahnemann,
whose therapeutic methods had demonstrated that the
natural tendency of disease was toward recovery, provided
that the patient was decently cared for, properly nursed,
and not over-dosed. This, it is true, had been emphasized
among others by Jacob Bigelow in his essay, remarkable
for the time (1835), on ^ Self-limited Disease ’ ; but it was

^ On this same date Osier was giving the opening lecture before the
students of the Montreal Veterinary College under the title, ‘ Comparative
Pathology a report of his remarks vn extenso being given in the Veterinary
Journal, Lond , 1878, vii. 405. After defining pathology as the physiology
and microscopical anatomy of disease, he referred to the Contagious Diseases
(animals) Act of 1878 as unjust to the cattle trade and warmly advocated
inspection as a protection against hog cholera, Texas fever, and so on.

172 Physician to the Montreal General Spring 1879

the therapeutic cult of homoeopathy, contiary to its intent,
that had given the actual proof. Dr. Rogers thus speaks of
Osier’s advent as physician in the ‘ M. G. H.’ :

When therefore his time came to take charge of a section of the
hospital, older doctors looked on with bated breath, expecting
disastrous consequences. He began by clearing up his ward com-
pletely. All the unnecessary semblances of sickness and treatment
were removed ; it was turned from a sick-room into a bright, cheerful
room of lepose. Then he started in with his patients. Very little
medicine was given. To the astonishment of everyone, the chronic
beds, instead of being emptied by disaster were emptied rapidly
through recovery ; under his stimulating and encouraging influence
the old cases nearly all disappeared, the new cases stayed but a short
tune. The revolution was wonderful. It was one of the most
forceful lessons in treatment that had ever been demonstrated. . . .

During this autumn, winter, and spring, the usual suc-
cession of brief reports before the Medico-Chirurgical
Society continued. There are eighteen separate titles given
in the full bibliography of the period, which would seem
to represent more presentations than could have been
thoroughly prepared for ; but his painstaking methods are
sufficiently well illustrated by the report upon two examples
of rare kidney tumour,^ as an appendix to which he gave
a long translation on the subject of tumours from Cohn-
heim’s celebrated ‘ Vorlesungen uber allgemeine Pathologic ’
which had just appeared (1877). So one may easily dog the
trail of what Osier called his inkpot career. He was the
activating spirit of the ‘ Medico-Chi.’, and should any
one wish to know how his contemporaries felt towards him,
the remarks made by Henry Howard, the distinguished
Canadian alienist and criminologist, on retiring as President
for the year, may be consulted. For Osier, in Hunterian
fashion and with an enthusiasm which was infectious,
appears to have given demonstrations on topics as diverse
as ‘ Giacomini’s Method of Preserving the Brain ’ and
‘ The Heart of the Swordfish with an Explanation of the
Comparative Anatomy of its Circulation ’.

During all this time, lest James Bovell be forgotten, there
are letters to his namesake which show not only that Father

^ Journal of Anatomy and- Physiology, Lond., Jan. 1880, xiv. 229.

Aet. 29 James Bovell again 173

Johnson is far from well ^ because of the poison inhaled from
that unfortunate small pox but also that the church is not
occupying BovelFs attention to the exclusion of medicine.

I am a most miserable recluse [he wrote], and rarely see any but
the members of my own family. I am not idle but have collected
a good deal towards a little Class Book on Germs in relation to
Disease. But I am kept back from want of a high objective. I had
just written to Beck about his i/aoth when your letter comes. Becks
is $85 so I felt quite dispirited. Have a talk with Fred, and see if
he can squeeze out 65 for Spencers Professional 1/4 which must be
a wonderful Glass. I am very poor it is true, but my goodness
anything to relieve this cruel monotony. As soon as the Manuscript
is ready I will send it with Drawings and most of the Specimens.
You see my clothing is Brian O’Lyng’s, ‘ for I have no breeches
to wear ’ and altho’ I am obliged to Knock under to Granny and let
her keep the purse I do hope somehow to contrive to get the 1/4
out of saved clothes. We have had a terrible time of it.

Bovell had become enthusiastic over the new views regard-
ing the bacterial causation of infectious diseases, and from
another of his letters it is evident that he had actually
observed anthrax bacilli in the organs of animals affected
with ^ cattle plague \ He could hardly have known of
Robert Koch’s epochal paper of the year before, identifying
the bacilli as the cause of the disease, but he writes to
Arthur Jukes Johnson : ^ Go quietly to work and without
letting anybody know what you are doing examine the
blood in every case of fever and pyaemia and also the matter
adhering to the ligatures when you draw them out. You
must get at least a i/i6th or a i/zoth Hartnack. Don’t sink
into a hum-drum sort of life.’ Such was James Bovell,
kept back from want of a high objective ’.

From May to July of this year Osier had his first taste
of instructing students at the bedside in the wards of the
Montreal General ; and during the next five years his
teaching-time was divided between the prescribed courses
in physiology and pathology during the winter session, and
clinical medicine in the summer.

We worked together [he subsequently wrote ^] through Gee’s
^ Auscultation and Percussion and in the ward visit, physical-

^ ‘ The Medical Clinic ; a Retrospect and a Forecast.’ British Medical
Journal^ Jan. 3, 1914.

1 74 Physician to the Montreal General Aug.-Sept. 1879

diagnosis exercises, and in a clinical microscopy class the greater
part of the morning was spent. I came across the other day the
clinical note-book I had prepared for the students, with a motto
from Froude, ‘ the knowledge which a man can use is the only real
knowledge, the only knowledge which has life and growth in it, and
converts itself into practical power. The rest hangs like dust about
the brain, or dries like raindrops off the stones.’

In August, Ross and Molson took over from Fenwick the
editorship of the Canada Medical and Surgical Journal,
in which so many of Osier’s brief papers during these past
years had been published, and he soon sent to them an
account of the meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science held on August 27th at Saratoga.^
This he had attended in view of a circular letter issued by
the General Secretary to the effect that a subsection of
Physiology and Anatomy would be established at the meet-
ing, and he must have foregathered with his future Baltimore
colleague Remsen, as well as Michelson and C. S. Minot.
He speaks also of Edison as the ‘ bogie of gas companies ’,
and says that Edison told him in conversation that ‘ he
believed it would be possible to illumine the interior of the
body by passing a small electric burner into the stomach
It appears that after this meeting Osier paid his first visit
to Beede’s, the famous Adirondack camp of his Boston
friends, H. P. Bowditch, Charles and James Putnam, and
William James, who ‘ had adapted the little story-and-a-half
dwelling to their own purposes and converted its surrounding
sheds and pens into habitable shanties of the simplest kind.
So they established a sort of camp, with the mountains for
their climbing, the brook to bathe in, and the primeval
forest fragrant about them.’ ^

The annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association
held in London, Ontario, soon followed, and there he made
a report for the Publication Committee in regard to the
second volume of Transactions, stating that the Association
evidently was not sufficiently advanced to justify the
continuance of the effort. The project, therefore, was
abandoned, but with MuUin and Sloan he was appointed

Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Sept. 1879, viii. 63.

^ ‘The Letters of William James.’ Boston, 1920

Aet. 30 Anatomy of the Brain 175

to a committee to look into the Association’s financial
affairs, a post for which he was far less well fitted. The
minutes of the meeting state that ; ‘ On the morning of
September iith, Dr. Osier of Montreal gave a description
of the anatomy of the brain, illustrating his remarks by
specimens preserved by Giacomini’s new process.’ This
Giacomini whose methods he had adopted, a most extra-
ordinary man, was Professor of Anatomy at Turin, where
in his laboratory he literally lived, died, and was buried,
in the midst of an amazing collection of brains. One of his
paramount interests was in cerebral topography," and being
a colleague of the famous criminologist Lombroso ^ it was
natural that he should have made a special study of the
brains of criminals, an occupation in which Osier likewise
became engaged, as will appear.

There followed a visit to Hamilton, where he saw for the
last time his old Barrie school friend ‘ Charlie ’ Locke, for
Locke died the next spring,^ leaving scant funds for his
family to live upon, like many another doctor; and the
burden of the education of his three children was subse-
quently assumed by Osier, who put one of them through
the medical school. Then Dundas, Toronto, and Weston
for the extensive round of visits it was his habit to make
on all old acquaintances ; and particularly when there were
children in the house one may be sure that there was a frolic
with considerable disarrangement of the nursery. The
pictures would have their faces to the wall, or a pillow-fight
would be promptly organized and in brief time an untidy
but happy child would be abruptly left with its delighted
but hysterical nurse. Dr. Adam Wright relates that Osier
called at his house one morning, and finding Mrs. Wright
telephoning the butcher, took the instrument from her and
most violently but amusingly berated the surprised person
at the other end for sending such an outrageously tough
steak the day before.

Another student, on Osier’s appeal, was added this
autumn to the establishment at 1351 St. Catherine Street.

^ Lombroso’s ‘ L’Uomo delinqnente ’ had been recently published, 1876.

^ ‘ Charles F. A. Locke, M.D., C M.’ Obituary notice by W. O. Canada
Medical and Surgical Journal^ 1 880, viii. 379.

176 Physician to the Montreal General Autumn 1879

Henry V. Ogden, a Southerner whose parents, had gone to
Canada after the Civil War, had been at Bishop’s College
School at Lennoxville near the lakes Magog and Memphre-
magog in Southern Quebec. He was a tall youth, therefore
with schoolboy quickness of wit called ^ Og, Rex Basan
and there was a school jingle concerning ^ Og, Gog, and
Memphremagog ’ which might mystify boys less familiar
with the Scriptures than those attending a church school.
As a first-year student in medicine, Ogden had been attend-
ing Osier’s lectures, and on learning from Rogers that he was
living in a forlorn boarding-house in a cheap part of the
town, Buller was persuaded by Osier to have him taken in.

... I can, aad do [writes Ogden], see him perfectly as he came up
to my room on the third floor of 1351 St. Catherine Street, the
second or third night after I moved m. I happened to be sitting
up in bed reading at physiology. He broke out at once in praise
of the habit of reading in bed, but heartily disapproved the physiology
— only literature, never medicine. He walked across the room
standing with his back to me, his hands in his trousers’ pockets,
tilting up and down on his toes, and inspecting the little collection
of about twenty or thirty books I had ranged on two small hanging
shelves ; and taking down the ^ Golden Treasury ’ came over, sat
on the foot of the bed, and half-recited, half-read, interjecting
a running comment, a number of the poems. Then tossing the
book to me he said : ‘ You’ll find that much better stuff than physio-
logy for reading in bed.’ That same evening, too, he spoke of
Sir Thomas Browne and the ‘ Religio ’, and probably for the first
time, for I don’t remember his making any reference to the subject
in the lectures at the college. His enthusiasm rose as he spoke, and
running downstairs he brought up his copy, pointed out and read
several passages and then left me. . . .

The whole incident — ^W. 0 ,’s coming up to my room, I mean —
made a tremendous impression, for I had never before met a pro-
fessor who struck one as so completely human, who actually liked
some of the same things you did, and above all talked about them
with you as an elder equal, so to speak. As you can imagine, it
started my relations with him on a pleasant footing and in a pleasant
direction, and naturally I have blessed my friend Rogers a thousand
times for getting me into 1351.

The three upstairs tenants breakfasted with Dr. Buller,
familiarly known as the ^ Landlord but otherwise they
lived a life apart — a young professor and two students who
became friends and intimates. Incidentally the students

Aet. 30 Three Office Consultations 177

were used by the professor from time to time for his own
dire purposes, and Ogden one day was sent to perform an
autopsy on a horse that had died from some mysterious
nervous ailment. It necessitated the removal ‘ intact and
in one piece ’ of the animal’s brain and spinal cord, a difficult
enough procedure even for one more experienced, and it
took Ogden nearly all day. Not knowing how to dispose
of the trophy, it being late afternoon, he took it home and
proudly laid it out full-length in the family bath-tub, where
it unfortunately was first discovered by Buller, who was
furiously angry. Osier luckily came in in time to save
from harm both specimen and student, and pacified the
‘ landlord ’ by agreeing to take the first bath.

In his reminiscences Dr. Rogers has stated that ‘ Osier’s
charity reached everyone in whom he could find some
measure of sincerity and application ’ ; that ‘ he had the
greatest contempt for the doctor who made financial gain
the first object of his work ’ ; and ‘ even seemed to go as far
as to think that a man could not make more than a bare
living and still be an honest and competent physician ’.
His student house-mates remember only three consultations
in his office, which indeed was hardly suited for this purpose,
being usually littered with untidy evidence of literary
activity. One of these consultations, however, was such
an important one that preparations had to be made for it
and Ogden was requisitioned as an assistant, for the patient
was none other than old Peter Redpath, the wealthy Mon-
treal sugar-refiner, who being on the ‘ M. G. H.’ Board
had hopes that the newly appointed physician might be
able to cure him of an intractable lumbago. He arrived
exhausted after mounting the stairs, and in due course they
proceeded to treat him by acupuncture, a popular procedure
of the day, which consists in thrusting a long needle into
the muscles of the small of the back. At each jab the old
gentleman is said to have ripped out a string of oaths, and
in the end got up and hobbled out, no better of his pain,
this to Osier’s great distress, for he had expected to give him
immediate relief which, as he said, ‘ meant a million for
McGill ’.

The first glimmering of Osier’s subsequent deep interest

2923.1

N

178 Physician to the Montreal General Spring 1880

in matters relating to medical history and biography dates
from this time, in connexion with an aged French-Canadian,
a one-time voyageur in the service of the American Fur
Company who had been accidentally wounded in the side
by the discharge of a musket on the 6th of June 1822 at
Michilimacinac. This accident and its consequences, and
the fact that the victim came under the care of William
Beaumont, a United States Army surgeon stationed at the
time in this frontier post, led to the most important contri-
butions to the physiology of digestion made during the
century. Fifty-seven years had elapsed, but, according to
a note in the Montreal Medical Journal for August of this
year, Alexis St. Martin, father of twenty children, stiU
with the hole in his stomach, was living at St. Thomas,
Joliette County, Province of Quebec. It is not improbable
that this note may have been inserted by Osier himself, for
it was his invariable custom to tell the story of Beaumont
and St. Martin when taking up the subject of digestion in
his course in physiology. After doing so he usually asked
the class where St. Martin’s stomach should finally be
deposited. A student of the time recalls that, in his year,
some one shouted : ‘ The McGill Museum ! ’ Osier said :

‘ No ’. Another then volunteered, ‘ Ottawa ’, and again,

‘ No ’, when a third suggested, ‘ The Hunterian Museum ’ ;
whereupon Osier said : ‘ Can’t you use your heads ? The
United States Army Museum in Washington, of course ’, and
at this juncture a red-headed Irish student asked ‘Why? ’
This had gone on with successive classes for a number
of years and it became generally known that Osier
expected to hold a post-mortem examination after old
St. Martin’s demise. So in this spring of 1880 Ogden
was told that he might have to go out to Joliette County
at a minute’s notice, for it was learned that St. Martin’s
end was near. Knowledge of Osier’s intent had reached the
community, which had apparently been aroused in opposi-
tion, and on the day of St. Martin’s death a warning
telegram came from the local doctor, saying : ‘ Don’t come
for autopsy ; will be killed ’, and this was followed by the
announcement that the grave was being guarded every
night by French Canadians armed with rifles ; but it was

Aet. 30 Prime Mover and Contributor 179

a great disappointment to Osier, who ‘ had offered to pay
a fair sum in case the relatives would agree to deposit the
stomach in the Army Medical Museum in Washington ’d

During this academic year of 1879-80 he had prevailed
upon his colleagues at the Montreal General to issue a
volume of Clinical Reports, of which he was the voluntary
editor. Though customary in British hospitals, this was
the first publication of the kind to be issued from a Canadian
institution,^ and its perusal shows that he was not only the
prime mover but the chief contributor ; for two of the
sixteen original papers were written by him, his name
appears as participant in several of the others,® and the
volume also contains a long detailed account of his second
series of autopsies. These were subsequently extracted
from the volume and separately published as his ‘ Pathologi-
cal Report No. II ’, which contains a preliminary note stating
that it ‘ comprises a selection from 225 post-mortems per-
formed between October 1877 and October 1879 Though
he credits the students with much of the labour, as a matter
of fact the actual autopsy records were written out in
long-hand in detail by himself, possibly from the notes given
to the students as bare memoranda. In the printed report,
however, the autopsy note is invariably preceded by a brief
account of the patient’s condition during life. Many of the
cases of more particular interest had from time to time been
presented at one of the meetings of the ‘ Medico-Chi.’
Society, and for this purpose probably put into some sort

^ Osier’s own brief account of the episode was given in his well-known
address, ‘ William Beaumont. A pioneer American Physiologist before the
St. Louis Medical Society in 1902. Cf. p. 590

^ ‘ Montreal General Hospital : Reports Clinical and Pathological.
Ed. by William Osier, M.D., M.R.C P., Lond.’ Montreal, Dawson Bros ,
1880, 369 pp.

® Thus R P, Howard, who has the leading article, an important one on
‘ Cases of Leucocythaemia ’, states in his preamble that : ‘ An additional
gratihcation is derived from the reflection that several contributions to the
condition of the bone medulla in pernicious anaemia have been made within
the last two years by my friend Professor Osier of this city, and it is
owing to his ability, industry, and zeal, that the writer of this paper is m
a condition to record the histological conditions of the bone-marrow and
blood in the following examples of that interesting and obscure affection,
leucocythaemia,’

N 2

i8o Physician to the Montreal General Spring 1880

of shape for ultimate publication, but the mere transcription
of such a record as this in the days before the typewriter
shows a prodigious energy.

During this academic year also, in addition to his physio-
logical course, his pathological demonstrations, his hospital
duties, and these two large Reports, he had published
five papers in conjunction with his colleagues, three
original independent papers, seven in conjunction with his
students, and before the ‘ Medico-Chi.’ had exhibited and
recorded at the successive meetings which he invariably
attended, thirty-five different specimens of sufficient rarity
in most cases to justify their preservation in the McGill
Museum of Pathology.^ There was one noteworthy thing
about Osier’s career as a pathologist, both in Montreal and
Philadelphia, vividly recalled and commented upon by
many who then stood as students at his elbow. This was
his franlcness over his own diagnostic errors, for if anything
was disclosed which had been overlooked or misinterpreted
he particularly dwelt upon it and called every one to see.
Then as regards the mistakes of others he had none of the
sly delight which many pathologists have evidenced in
'showing-up ’ at the autopsy table the opinions of their
clinical colleagues. A remarkable story is told, indeed, of
how, to spare a surgeon’s feelings, he concealed the truth
regarding a bad operative error. When this incident was
recalled by some one in his presence many years later. Osier
hesitated and then said : ‘ He never asked me for a definite
written report. In fact, no one but you and I ever knew
of the unfortunate circumstance — and we have both
forgotten it.’

But with all this serious attention to his real work in
life, it must not be forgotten that Osier was always ready
for a frolic and was fond of a j est, whether at his own expense

^ It had been Osier’s intention to issue a third volume of these Reports,
as subsequent notes will show. Though he was never actually appointed
Pathologist (so it is stated) at the ‘ M.G.H.’, his official successors in the
position were in turn Wyatt Johnston, John McCrae the soldier-poet,
B. D. Gillies, C. W. Duval, S. B. Wolbach, and Lawrence J. Rhea. In 1895
Wyatt Johnston issued a third volume of Reports consisting largely of
a bare statistical study. He states that since Osier’s day there had been
fifteen complete changes of management in the laboratory.

Aet. 30 Introducing E. Y. Davis 1 8 1

or at that of another. In 1880, shortly after Ross and
Molson had taken over from Fenwick the Canada Medical
and Surgical Journal, there appeared on the scene a creature
named Egerton Yorrick Davis, soon recognized as a patho-
logical fabricator of ill repute, whose name became coupled
with that of William Osier. Among the manuscripts
preserved in the Osier library there are eight sheets of
note-paper containing an article which starts ofi as follows :

Professional Notes among the Indian Inbes
about Gt. Slave Lake, N.W.I.
by

Egerton Y. Davis, M.D. Late U. S. Army Surgeon.

The following notes may be of interest to the readers of your
local journal, though bearing as much upon social as upon medical
subjects. They are the outcome of many years’ intercourse among
the natives in the above-mentioned locality. . . .

The article, purporting to deal with some ancient tribal
rites observed by the Indians of the Northwest and written
in a pseudo-serious and somewhat Rabelaisian vein, had been
mailed to the journal office during the absence from town
of Ross, the senior editor, and soon after Molson’s appoint-
ment as co-editor. Accepted by Molson as an authentic
communication, it was forwarded to the Gazette Printing
Company to be set up for publication. This printing office
used to be frequented by Osier, who scribbled across the
manuscript on its being returned with the galley-proof to
the journal office : ‘ Joke on Molson. W. 0 .’ Molson had
his revenge a year later.

This man E. Y. Davis, who was first heard of at Fort
Desolation in the Great Slave Lake district and subsequently
moved down to Caughnawauga, a hamlet across the river
from Montreal, had an interesting and somewhat varied life ;
and so far as is known he was the only one of Osier’s early
Montreal acquaintances who in later years he deliberately
endeavoured to avoid. There are many stories about him,
some of them probably apocryphal, and from time to time
he had a way of unexpectedly bobbing up without proper
introduction, to the mystification of the uninitiated.

Doctors as a class are notably gregarious, but perhaps none

1 82 Physician to the Montreal General Aug.-Oct. 1880

of his kind were ever more faithful in their attendance upon
medical meetings, local or national, general or special, than
Osier. To follow his footsteps ere long inevitably leads to
one somewhere, and this June he was found in New York
for the annual session of the American Medical Association.
He wrote an open letter, for Ross to publish, describing
the occasion for the benefit of his Canadian colleagues not
in the habit of attending American — scarcely their own —
society meetings ; and though it is hardly in his best vein
he mentions the registration of 800 members, then regarded
as phenomenal, and also the organization under Abraham
Jacobi’s leadership of a new Section to deal with the diseases
of children.

After the close of the summer session, August was passed
in an excursion for his almost-forgotten fresh- water polyzoa,
and together with Ross he probably spent some time at the
Shepherds’ summer place at Como on the Ottawa, for the
three were not often long separated. Osier was a lean and
somewhat shadowy person at this period, but full of fun as
usual, and it was his delight to abuse an old Irish house-
keeper of Shepherd’s by calling her the ‘ hypotenuse of
a right-angled triangle ’ and using similar terrifying epithets
until she had retreated to her proper regions, audibly
chuckling that ‘ that skinny yaller Doctor Rosier would be
the death of her yet ’.

Early in September came a meeting in Ottawa of the
Canadian Medical Association, of which at the time
Palmer Howard was President, and Osier as usual took an
active part in the proceedings. He read an important paper
on spastic spinal paralysis, gave a report on the progress in
pathology, and it is characteristic to find him proposing at
the business session : ‘ that the time devoted to the reading
of any paper, except addresses on special subj ects which at
a previous meeting had been assigned to a member, shall not
exceed thirty minutes ’. There were two human frailties
which perhaps irritated him as much as any others — one of
them was unpunctuality, the other was garrulousness ; and
it was one of his common sayings to students that punctuality
and brevity were primary requisitions of a physician and
might ensure success even with other qualities lacking.

Aet. 31 Drums, Needles, and Tambours 183

_ The new physiological laboratory of which Gardner had
given promise to the students the year before was ready for
occupancy in the autumn, and Osier in describing it^ could
hardly have failed to have uppermost in mind Bowditch’s
ample space and abundant apparatus at Harvard. It was
merely the conversion into a laboratory of three small
lecture-rooms of the medical building ; but it was a forward
step, for he confesses that for six years he had used ‘ the
practical chemistry laboratory for the Saturday demonstra-
tions and the students’ waiting-room in the summer session
for the histology classes He enumerated, piece by piece,
the equipment he had been able to gather together, includ-
ing, besides his eleven Hartnack microscopes (the twelfth
appears to have gone to Johnson) and three microtomes,
a kymograph and other things commonly found in a
physiological laboratory of the Ludwig- Kronecker type with
the use of which he was less adept. He was unskilled in the
setting-up of apparatus, his physiological training with
Sanderson having been of a different sort from that received
by Bowditch and the innumerable other pupils of the
Leipzig School under Carl Ludwig. For in Germany
the microscope was primarily the research instrument of
the anatomist and pathologist rather than of the physio-
logist as in England ; and years later in a letter to W. G.
MacCaUum he confessed :

... I followed the line of least resistance. There was always
technique enough to do a good p.m., but never enough to handle
complicated apparatus. I never could get my drums and needles
and tambours to work in harmony. After all, it makes a good basis
for the hard work and for the teaching of bread-and-butter medicine
to medical students.

More to his taste were medical and public-health ques-
tions, and in December of this year he was made a member
of a committee, together with two others from the Faculty of
Medicine of Bishop’s College, to investigate an outbreak of
typhoid fever which had occurred at Bishop’s College School,
Lennoxville.^ It may be recalled that in 1880 Eberth had

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Nov. 1880, ix. 198.

^ This led to an elaborate report, signed Jan. 21, 1881, dealing with, the
samtary conditions at the school, which were far from the best. Cf. the
Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Feb. l88i, ix. 433,

1 84 Physician to the Montreal General Dec. 1880

only just isolated the typhoid bacillus, and the methods of
its cultivation had not as yet been perfected, so that had
the discovery been known and the relation of the bacillus
to the disease been widely accepted it could hardly have
been utilized at this time. In conjunction with the com-
mittee’s report, an editorial appeared in the local journal,
entitled ‘ Does Typhoid Arise Spontaneously ? ’ And it is
not unlikely that Osier, too, may have been influenced at
this time by the opinion of Murchison, Flint, Pepper, and
others who believed that the poison might be generated
independently and not merely passed on from a previous
case. The chief interest, however, in this episode lies in
the fact that Osier was chosen to serve on a committee with
members of the faculty of a school which, having a medical
department of its own, regarded itself as a rival of McGill ;
and to pass judgement on a public-health question which
chiefly concerned a dependency of this other institution.

This year of 1880 bridged the last days of the two men
whose influence on Osier’s life had been greatest. For
a year or more BoveU’s concern about Johnson’s health had
been expressed in numerous letters, but Bovell himself was
first to go — on January 15th in his seventy-fourth year,
a few days after a paralytic stroke. On December 29, 1880,
the Rev. W. A. Johnson died, in his sixty-fifth year — much
beloved despite his faults. Not long before, he had written
to his son, Bovell’s namesake, these words of his boyhood in
England :

... I remember Greenwich & Lewisham well. Bromley Hays
Common & a little bit further to a village called ‘ Down ’. You
may go & see my old home. It was then called ‘ Down House ’.
‘The House of the neighbourhood in those days. Some of the oldest
crones in the Village would soon tell you all about Col“ Johnson &®.
These English peasants do not move much : & that village is so
situated as not to be cut up by Railways. You had better take
a horse and ride over there some day. Tell me how the old Ch.
is. Drummond was the Priest in my time the lowest of the low.
The Hendersons are at Seal too I believe. See the old Roman
trenches at Wards park & on Hays Common. The ponds
called ‘ ravensbourne ’ said to be so called because a raven was seen
drinking there w** led to the discovery of water for Caesar’s
men. Those chalk hills are interesting as well as magnificent.

Aet. 31 Death of Johnson and Bovell 185

I expect a long account one of these days. Lewisham is no longer
long, lazy, lousy Lewisham as Geo. IV called it, I suppose. I re-
member a very nice stream running through it on the left hand
as you go from Bromley to London. Hundreds of times have
I ridden and driven through it. Further down near Chiselhurst
and Farnboro & over the hills to Seven Oaks is the beautiful
country. Said to be the Garden of Eng. How I have made the horse
hoofs patter over those hills as a boy. Fine hunting in those days,
they used to throw off at Farnboro : and a stag has been known
to run for the coast from there, O how I would like to set foot
on those pleasure spots of my youth once again but cui bono ? It
is only the natural man & the less he has that gratifies 8 c indulges
him the better. Still methinks it would cause my heart to bound
with thankfulness but there is plenty here to be thankful for. Write
long descriptions like a good fellow when you get time. . . . The
Lord prosper you. . . .

For four years ‘ Father ’ Johnson had been far from well —
ever since a serious smallpox epidemic in Weston during
which he had volunteered as a public vaccinator, having,
it is said, on one day alone vaccinated the two-hundred
employees of the Weston Woollen Mills. It is not clear
whether he actually contracted a mild form of the disease
himself, but if so he was less fortunate than Osier had been.
The coroner’s statement reads as follows :

* County of York: Division Yoikville.

Death Certificate of W. A, Johnson,

Septicaemic Lymphadenitis contracted in Weston in handling
a dead body infected with Black Small Pox and which all but himself
and his clerk refused to touch.

Cornelius James Philbrick.

Dec. 29, 1880.

Johnson lies buried in the churchyard of St. Philip’s,
Weston ; Bovell in that of his parish, St. Paul’s, in Nevis,
British West Indies.

CHAPTER IX
1881-3

LAST YEARS IN MONTREAL

It is possible that the death of his two old friends and
preceptors spurred Osier to put in print the results of some
of the zoological studies with which the^ had been so
intimately associated. At the January meeting of the
Natural History Society he presented some notes supple-
mentary to his paper on the fresh-water polyzoa, read before
the same society just four years before. He mentioned
a species of Cristatella as having been found in abundance
and described what he regarded as a new species of Pectina-
tella — evidently the one already mentioned which had
fallen into the hands of the Rev. Thomas Hincks, F.R.S.,
of London, by way of his father, whose class in botany had
been attended at Trinity. Moreover, during the nest
summer, as will appear, he returned to his old — and to some
new — hunting-grounds for further specimens.

Osier frequently referred to himself as a note-book man —
for he read pen in hand and was in the habit of jotting down
a quotation which had struck his fancy or a thought which
had come to his mind in relation to something he was
composing. It was not uncommon for him, at least in
later years, to write fragments of papers or addresses on
a stray piece of paper or on the blank fly-leaves of a book
he might happen at the time to be reading. Many of these
fragments are still to be found scattered among the volumes
of his library. In the copy of Alpheus Hyatt’s ‘ Observations
on Polyzoa which W. A. Johnson had given him for
Christmas i868, occur some random notes which probably
formed the basis of this paper read before the Natural
History Society. The first of them tells how he found the
Cristatellae the summer before during a stay of two weeks
at the country residence of Mr. G. W. Stephens at Lac a
I’Eau Claire, about 35 miles north of Three Rivers. He
identified them with the Cristatella ophiiioidea of Hyatt.

He read by invitation on January 26th an important

Aet. 31 A Flight into Psychology 187

paper before the New York Pathological Society, an
organization which since its foundation in 1844 had com-
prised among its members the most active and influential
of the local profession. His topic was Ulcerative Endocar-
ditis,^ and he described the presence of what he took to be
micrococci in the vegetations of the valves of the heart,
a finding which was received with some scepticism. So
the year was punctuated with meetings in various places ;
with papers on most varied topics. For his second Somer-
ville Lecture, given in March under the auspices of the
Natural History Society, he spoke ‘ On the Brain as a
Thinking Organ suggesting a flight into psychology, with
the results of which it would seem he was not sufficiently
satisfied to put anything into print. Later in the same
month he was delegated to attend the Cincinnati meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, and the association accepted a pressing invitation
to hold its next meeting in Montreal under Dawson’s
presidency. Nor was there any let-up in the succession of
communications to the local societies — sometimes a few
unusual autopsy specimens were shown ; occasionally some
original contributions or a partly worked-up subject was
presented ; and later on during the summer session a few
of his more carefully prepared clinical lectures, after a
personal revision, were reported by students. Whatever his
other interests, the welfare of his pupils invariably came
first, and just at this time the Faculty of Medicine an-
nounced that a clinical prize of a fifty-doUar microscope had
been offered by Dr. Osier for the student who should pass
with highest marks a special examination to be held at the
end of the course.^

^ This article was published a month later (Archives of Med , N.Y., Feb.
1881, V. 44) under the changed title of ‘ Infectious (so-called ulcerative)
Endocarditis Though the observations were largely confirmatory of the
work of Klebs and others, it was the first important paper on the subject in
American literature.

® Osier and Ross were the examiners, and ‘ Mr. R. J. B. Howard [Palmer
Howard’s son Jared] was the successful candidate, obtaining 322 out of the
possible 350 marks ’. It was an exceedingly thorough test, comprising ;
(i) a written paper ; (2) a practical examination of a patient necessitating
the use of the ophthalmoscope and laryngoscope , and (3) microscopical

Aet. 32 Attending Paget’s Congress 189

One of the most notable of the succession of great
international medical congresses was that of 1881 held in
London under the presidency of Sir James Paget. Osier
and R. Palmer Howard went to this meeting together,
sailing on the Allan Line s.s. Parisian for Liverpool some
time in June,^ and at the close of the congress he sent a long
account of the proceedings in the form of a letter (dated
August 10) for Ross to publish.^ As he said, ‘ the sight of
above 3,000 medical men from all parts of the world, drawn
together for one common purpose, and animated by one
spirit was enough to quicken the pulse and to rouse enthu-
siasm to a high pitch, whereas the presence of the Prince
of Wales and Crown Prince of Prussia added a flavour of
Royal patronage which even science — republican though
it be — seemed thoroughly to enjoy The event of the
meeting was unquestionably Paget’s opening address —
high praise, considering the names of those who spoke at
the subsequent general meetings : Virchow ‘ On the Value
of Pathological Experiment ’ ; John S. Billings of Washing-
ton ‘ On Medical Literature ’ ; Huxley ‘ On the Connexion
of the Biological Sciences with Medicine ’ ; and finally
Pasteur, who at the special request of the President described
his recent experiments, which showed that animals could be
protected ‘ against certain scourges ’ by vaccination.

Osier evidently heard these addresses, but his time was spent
elsewhere : in the Physiological Section, where an animated
discussion on Cerebral Localization took place in which
Goltz of Strasbourg, Brown-Sequard, Ferrier, and others
participated ; in the Pathological Section presided over by
Wilks, where the discussions on tubercle (Koch’s discovery
of the bacillus was not reported until the next year), on
germs, on cardiac and renal disease chiefly interested him ;

^ Shortly before, at a meeting of the ‘Medico -Chi.’ Society on June lo,
a paper was read by Dr. Armstrong on ‘ Perityphlitis ’ describing a case in
which the autopsy by Osier had shown an abscess at the head of the caecum.
In the discussion, ‘ Dr. Osier referred to the fact that no part of the body
varied so much as the appendix vermiformis. It coils m various directions
and owing to its changed situations may get inflamed.’ He evidently was
very near to an understanding of appendicular disease. This was five years
before Fitz gave his classic paper on perforative appendicitis.

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Sept. l88l, x. 121-5.

Last Years in Montreal

190

Aug. 1881

and in the Medical Section under Sir William Gull’s chair-
manship, where neurological papers were read by Hughlings
Jackson, Brown- Sequard, Buzzard, Erb and others. He even
gave an account of the excursions, one of which was to
Folkestone, where the memorial statue of Harvey was
unveiled and an address given by Professor Owen.^ All told,
it was a remarkable meeting, participated in by many whose
names will always occupy a high rank in medical history,
the outstanding figures being Pasteur, Lister, Virchow,
Huxley, Paget, Hughlings Jackson, and Charcot. But there
was also a younger group forging to the front, among them
a Hanoverian named Robert Koch, appointed the year
before to the Imperial Health Department in Berlin.

It is apparent that Osier, like many other physicians, did
not appear at this time fully to grasp as Lister did the
significance of Pasteur’s work, or to show great interest in
Koch’s remarkable contributions ; and in his letter he
dismissed the subject with the mere statement that ‘ there
was an abundant discussion on germs ’ in the Pathological
Section. Indeed the editorials in most of the British and
Canadian journals of the time intimate that M. Pasteur
saw germs everywhere, and his views regarding their
prevalence as a cause of disease were regarded as rather
horrible, if not mirth-provoking. Osier’s suggestions in his
paper on Endocarditis, that there might be a bacterial
origin for the vegetations, was based purely on microscopical
studies, for he had had no bacteriological training, and
indeed the cultivation of organisms was at the time in its
infancy, requiring a special technique known to but few.

At the first meeting of the ‘ Medico-Chi.’ held after their
return to Montreal, Palmer Howard went into further
details regarding the lively discussion which had taken place
upon ‘ the subject of micro-organisms and their relations
to specific diseases, and especially to unhealthy processes

^ He fails, however, to mention his own important paper before the
Pathological Section, on Endocarditis, a subject he was still pursuing ; nor
does he speak of the sessions on comparative pathology and the fact that
he was a delegate of the Montreal Veterinary Association to the British
National Veterinary Congress, whose session he attended on July 20th and
of whose proceedings on his return to Montreal he gave a resume on October
27th at one of the fortnightly meetings of the Montreal association.

Aet. 32

A Discussion on Germs

191

arising in wounds This discussion had been participated
in by Lister, by Virchow, and by Bastian, to whose views
on spontaneous generation reference has already been made ;
and finally as Howard said : ^

The great Pasteur produced a sensation by first confessing that
his ignorance of English and German had prevented his following
the arguments of the previous speakers ; and then by exclaiming
in reply to Dr. Bastian, who, he was told, held that micro-organisms
may be formed by heterogenesis of the tissues : ‘ Mats, mon Dieii,
ce n^est fas fossihle^ and without advancing any argument then sat
down. The eminent man for the moment seemed unable to realize
the possibility of intelligent dissent from his assertion. However,
in his address on the germ theory, delivered subsequently, he vindi-
cated his reputation as the ‘ father ’ of living fungologists.^

One incident of this congress may be mentioned as it
introduces a name, or names, to appear in a later chapter.
Dr. S. D. Gross of Philadelphia, regarded as the dean
of American surgery, who had been President of the
International Congress held in 1876, had been prevented
from attending in person, but sent in his stead his son,
who had recently married Miss Grace Linzee Revere of
Boston. They visited the Regius Professor of Medicine
in Oxford, Sir Henry Acland, in whose house Mrs. Gross
first saw the panel of Linacre, Harvey, and Sydenham over
his mantel, a copy of which she was destined to live with
for many years. She recalls that on their return Dr. Gross,
sr., asked his son to give his impressions of the men he had
seen, and he replied that he had heard a swarthy young

^ Howard, R. P. ; ‘ Some Observations upon the International Congress.’
Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Oct. i88i, x. 144-54.

2 Possibly the most important session of this famous Congress was not
attended either by Howard or Osier, viz. when so-called ‘ Listerism ’ was
discussed at the Surgical Section by Spencer Wells, Marion Sims, and Volk-
mann the eminent German surgeon (the Richard Leander of German poetry).
Lister was beginning to feel that wound-contamination by the air was less
important than he had believed, and he was on the eve of abandoning the
‘ carbolic spray ’ — a step the profession could not understand, for he was too
far ahead for others fully to grasp his views. Much merriment was provoked
in the lay press at the expense of microbes in general. Cf. ‘ The Ballad of the
Bacillus ’ in Punch :

Oh merry Bacillus, no wonder you lay
Quiescent and calm when at home in your hay, etc.

Last Years in Montreal

192

Aug. 1881

Canadian named Osier give one of the best j)apers of the
congress, and that he hoped some day they might get him
in Philadelphia. This same swarthy young Canadian had
returned home too late to attend another meeting, namely
of the Canadian Medical Association held at Halifax early
in August, and was penalized for his absence by an election
to the onerous position of General Secretary to succeed
Dr. A. H. David, Dean of the Medical Faculty of Bishop’s
College, who having held the post for many years wished
to retire because of iU health and advancing age.

The Francis cousins spent this summer at Lake Mem-
phremagog in Southern Quebec, and one may be sure,
despite all these medical meetings, that the children were
not forgotten by their devoted playmate. Before going
abroad he had run down for a brief visit, and on his return
joined them again at the lake, adorned, as a contemporary
letter says : ‘ with an awful beard and whiskers ultimately
removed because of protestations of horror on the part of
the medical faculty ’. He was apparently accompanied by
Ogden, with whom he evidently renewed his zoological
studies, as is apparent from some notes read at the November
meeting of the Natural History Society,^ one of which
‘ On a Remarkable Vital Phenomenon observed at Lake
Memphremagog ’ begins as follows :

During the first week in September 1881, the water of the lake
presented a peculiar appearance, owing to a number of minute
green particles floating in it. In places they were so thickly crowded
together that the water was of a deep green colour. Except near
shore they did not float on the surface but were diffused through the
water to the depth of several feet. It was suggested to me by a friend
that they were pollen grains, but their diffusion through the water
and the season of the year seemed against this. They looked not
unlike Volvox glohator, but I have never seen this alga in such pro-
fusion. Fortunately, I had my microscope with me and the question
was soon settled. Each little green mass formed a gelatinous ball,
about one-thirtieth of an inch in diameter, and enclosed numerous
unbranched beaded filaments, and proved to be a Nostoc — Nostoc
minuUssimum — a minute confervoid alga met with in water and in

^ These were read Nov. 7, 1881, ‘ to be published in a future number ’,
which possibly refers to the ‘ Biology Notes ’ in the Canadian Naturalist,
1883, s. 251.

Aet. 32

A Laboratory Manual 193

moist places. It is not a very uncommon species in our ponds, the
remarkable point is the extraordinary profusion in which it occurred.
The Nostoc commune is plentiful in the ponds at the Mile End,
forming irregular balls the size of a horse-chestnut. . . .

On the reopening of the school in the autumn he enjoyed
for the first time the luxury of an assistant — T. Wesley
Mills, a promising young physiologist who had been for
a year at University College and had subsequently worked
under Newell Martin for a time in the Johns Hopkins
Biological Laboratory. The course in physiology and
practical histology was gradually being perfected, and
Osier had prepared an admirable laboratory manual ^
which is prefaced by an appeal ‘ To the Student ’ to
familiarize himself with the use of the microscope.

As a practical introduction to his subject in hand this
concise students’ manual could hardly have been bettered.
In those early days when the clinical use of the microscope
was less familiar than now, the course Osier developed
represented a great advance. Histology, as has been pointed
out, in the sense he used it really covered the study
of structure in the broadest possible manner, with enough
physiology and pathology thrown in to give these subjects
their proper bearing upon the understanding of disease at
the bedside. In later years his laboratory assistants were
often astonished by his familiarity with the problems in
their particular field, for though fully aware of his unusual
experience as a gross pathologist they were apt to forget
that the fundamental principles of physiology had been
almost as thoroughly mastered during his early years of
teaching.^

^ ‘ Students’ Notes : Normal Histology for Laboratory and Class Use.’
Montreal, Dawson Bros., 1882.

^ He was giving at this time four separate courses : PracUcal Physiology
every Saturday afternoon from two to four during the winter session ;
Normal Histology bi-weekly throughout the year; Morhii Anatomy every
Saturday morning ; and his favourite course in Clinical Microscopy y ‘ especially
designed to meet the requirements of a practitioner ’, bi-weekly during the
summer session. An account of one of the Saturday-mormng exercises which
gives an idea of their character was reported by Palmer Howard’s son, then
one of the students, in the Canadian Journal of Medical Science, 1881, vi. 350,
under the title : ^ Notes of the Second Demonstration in the Morbid
Anatomy Course in McGill College.’

2923 I

o

Last Years in Montreal

Autumn i88i

194

Such communications as appeared under his name from
the physiological laboratory during the next three years
were purely observational, not experimental, and dealt
chiefly with studies on the blood which continued to hold
his interest. One of these papers, ‘ On Certain Parasites
in the Blood of the Frog began as follows :

111 my Practical Histology class, during the winter of 1881-2,
while the students were working at the blood of the frog {Rana
mugiens) I noticed in one of the slides a remarkable body like a
flagellate infusorian. I thought that it was one which had got into
the blood, at the time of withdrawal, from the water on the web
of the foot. Meeting with examples in the slides of several other
students my attention was again directed to it and I made several
sketches and wrote down the following description. . . .

The parasites proved to be varieties of Trypanosoma
sanguinis, and though the observation, as he found, was not
original, for Ray Lankester had previously described them,
he gave an account of the behaviour of these bodies within
the blood cells in a way which indicates his alert powers of
observation.^

There were few important discoveries or trends in
medical science which did not at one time or another
engage his attention. In all probability his interest in
heredity and especially in the inheritance of disease had
been aroused by Francis Galton’s writings on the subject
which had begun in the ’70’s. This had already mani-
fested itself by the publication two years before of the
first of his several papers on these topics, when he described
a hereditary nervous malady occurring in the Farr family in

^ Canadtan Naturahst, 1883, x. 406-10.

^ His three other papers on the blood which may be regarded as contribu-
tions to physiology were as follows : one of them entitled ^ Cells containing
Red Blood-corpuscles ’ {Lancet^ Lond., Feb. 4, 1882, i. 181) dealt with the
taking up of red blood-cells by leukocytes and he speaks of examining the
bone-marrow of over seventy-five persons in making the studies. The term
phagocytosis was not introduced until four years later by Metchnikofi, who
used it in relation to the engulfing of bacteria by white blood-corpuscles.
Osier had evidently observed the same physiological phenomenon. Another
paper dealt with the development of the blood-corpuscles in the bone-
marrow ; and the third was a note on the origin of the microcytes which
he had seen separating off from the ordinary red blood-corpuscles.

Aet. 32 The Brains of Criminals 195

Vermont.^ In the earl^ ’8o’s, moreover, following the
discovery by Fritsch and Hitzig of the electrical excitability
of the brain there was a great wave of interest in localization
of cerebral function which had encouraged many to under-
take a more detailed study, of the form and volume of the
brain as well as the topography of its surface, than had
previously been made. Osier’s interest in Giacomini’s
method of preserving the brain has been mentioned, as well
as his flight into psychology in one of his Somerville Lectures;
and he was now aroused by a recent paper (1879) by Moritz
Benedikt of Vienna who had stated that ‘ the brains of
criminals exhibit a deviation from the normal type, and
criminals are to be viewed as an anthropological variety of
their species, at least among the cultured races

Fortune favoured him, for he succeeded in coming into
possession of the brains of two notorious criminals who had
been executed after trials, famous in Canadian medico-legal
annals, reports of which occur in the medical journals of the
day. One of these individuals was Hugh Hayvern, who de-
spite the plea of insanity was hanged for a brutal murder he
had committed ; the other, a poor half-witted Frenchman
named Moreau, was executed on January 13, at Rimouski
in Lower Canada. Osier had secured permission from
the Dominion Government to attend the execution and
perform the autopsy, and H. V. Ogden was sent by him as
his representative with the admonition that he was to
secure the brain without fail — an unpleasant task, as he
recalls, for a raw young medical student speaking French
imperfectly, who never having performed a human autopsy
in his life was therefore in a desperate ‘ funk ’, in an out-
of-the-way place and in the dead of a Canadian winter with
the temperature 10° below zero.

In his paper Professor Benedikt had made certain state-
ments regarding the prevalence of convolutional peculiari-
ties in the brains of criminals. This finding Osier not
only failed to support, but pointed out that the supposed
anomalies in question were frequent in the general run
of human brains. The article represented a careful topo-

^ ‘ On Heredity m Progressive Muscular Atrophy/ Archives of Medicine,
N.Y , 1880, iv. 316.

Last Years in Montreal

196

Jan. 1882

graphical study of the brains of the two homicides, but it
otherwise is, for him, somewhat sarcastic.^ He closed
by saying, as ‘ B. B.’ Osier might have done : ‘ One thing
is certain : that, as society is at present constituted it cannot
a£Eord to have a class of criminal automata, and to have
every rascal pleading faulty grey-matter in extenuation of
some crime. The law should continue to be a “ terror to
evil-doers ”, and to let this anthropological variety (as
Benedict calls criminals) know positively that punishment
will follow the commission of certain acts, should prove
an effectual deterrent in many cases.’ Subsequently an
editorial appeared in the London Lancet taking him to
task for being too severe with Professor Benedikt, and to
this he replied,^ clearly setting forth the reasons on which
he had based his own conclusions. The entire episode is
important only in showing Osier’s eagerness in the pursuit
of knowledge and his outspokenness of opinion. It has
a bearing, too, upon some subsequent events, for it was not
his last paper on cerebral topography ; and when some years
later the Wistar Institute came to be established in Philadel-
phia, he with a number of others (F. X. Dercum, Harrison
Allen, Joseph Leidy, William Pepper, and E. C. Spitzka)
formed what was called the Anthropological Society and
agreed to bequeath their own brains for study.

Lest the recital of all these academic pursuits leave an
impression of drab scholarly life without relaxation, it
should be said that there was undoubtedly time for play,
though of this there are fewer documentary records.
Innumerable stories of the famous Dinner Club still con-
tinue to be handed down in Montreal ; and at the monthly
meetings which took place at the homes of the various
members in succession there was great skylarking. They
are mostly tales of Osier’s pranks, many of which were
perpetrated at Molson’s expense. They are not much in
the telling ; at the first meeting, for example, after Molson’s

^ ‘ On the Brains of Criminals.’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal,
1882, X 38S~9®- a 7®®*" l^ter he made a report on the brains of two other
notorious criminals : ibid., xi. 4.61-6. In this he adds nothing new, and
merely dismisses Benedikt’s conclusions as unwarranted.

® Lancet, Lond , 1882, ii. 38.

Aet. 32 Early Public Health Interests 197

marriage, Osier going somewhat late to the club stopped at
Molson’s house and asked Mrs. Molson for a latchkey, remark-
ing that it might be needed ; they usually had some trouble
in getting ‘ Billy ’ home, and as he might have to be carried
in it would be convenient to have a key. An abstainer
himself at this period, no stimulant was needed to make
Osier the gayest of a dinner-party.

His interest in parasitology, which, as the natural out-
come of his early microscopic studies with Johnson and
Bovell, had led him to study and tabulate all the
parasites he could identify in man and animals, was still
in evidence. He rarely failed to report before one of the
societies any chance post-mortem finding which had some
bearing on the general subject. Thus on February 17th
before the ‘ Medico-Chi.’ he showed an example of bronchi-
ectasis in the lung of a calf, a case of glanders, also a rare
specimen of verminous aneurysm from a horse’s aorta ; and
later in the year an example of Amfhistoma comcum irom
the paunch of a cow. All this merely serves to indicate his
great interest in the study of animal diseases, to satisfy
which he continued to hold his position with the Veterinary
School.

Throughout this year, in conjunction with one of the
veterinary students, A. W. Clement, he was engaged in an
exhaustive study of the parasites of the pork supply of
Montreal. In their report,^ ultimately presented before
the Board of Health, January 12, 1883, they emphasized
the necessity of strict governmental supervision over the
sources of food supply, and of meat inspection in particular.
They dealt particularly with the three more common
parasites transmissible to man — trichina, cysticercus, and
echinococcus — and the amount of labour expended on their
studies is indicated by the statement that 1,037 hogs were
examined, chiefly at the Dominion abattoir, during a
period of six to eight months. When this is gauged with
what was said in the section on Trichina, namely that in
his human autopsies numbering between 800 and 900 Osier
had found four cases, it can be seen that their material and
experience, enabling them to draw comparisons between
^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Jan. 1883, xi. 325-36.

198 Last Years in Montreal Feb. 1882

animals and man, was large. This timely investigation was
of great public service and was a contribution to the health
and hygiene of the community which probably had more
weight as coming from a physician holding no political office
than had it originated from some other source. As a
by-product of this study he took up, as he had already done
with trichinosis, the subject of echinococcus infections in
man, this being a parasitic disease transferred more com-
monly from the dog to man, and a rare condition except in
Iceland and Australia. On this quest he visited the museums
of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington ^ in the search
for specimens.

He was engaged at this same time in another piece of
work of similar nature, though it pertained to a purely
animal disease produced by a parasite, namely, cestode
tuberculosis.^ This study was also carried out in conjunc-
tion with Mr. A. W. Clement, and they recorded a successful
feeding experiment with the production of the disease in
the calf — an experiment undertaken to afford the students
of the Veterinary College an opportunity of studying the
development of the symptoms.

One of the most important discoveries bearing upon the
relation of micro-organisms to disease, a subject which made
this particular decade stand out above all others in the

^ ‘ In 1881 1 paid my first visit to tlie great library of tbe Surgeon-General’s
Office, Washington, to look up the literature of echinococcus disease in
America, a subject in which I had become interested. At that date the
Library had not yet moved from the old Pension Office and the books had
far outgrown the capacity of the building. It was my first introduction to
Dr, John S. Billings, at present the head of the Public Library, New York,
to whose energy and perseverance the profession of the United States is
indebted for one of the greatest collections of medical books in the world.
He handed me over to the care of an elderly gentleman who very quickly
put at my disposal the resources of the library and for two days did everything
in his power to further my wishes. This was the beginning of a warm
friendship with Dr. Robert Fletcher, and during the thirty years which have
since passed I always found him a kindly, wise and generous adviser in all
matters relating to medical bibliography. Probably few men in the profession
owe a deeper debt of gratitude to the Surgeon-General’s Library than L’
(‘ Robert Fletcher. 1823-1912.’ Bristol Medtco-Chtrurgtcal Journal^ Dec.
1912.)

2 Presented before the Montreal Veterinary Association, Jan. 19, 1882.
American Veterinary Review ^ Apr. 1882, vi, 6-10,

Aet. 32 The Tubercle Bacillus igg

history of medicine, was announced this same year — Koch’s
discovery of the tubercle bacillus. It is difBcult to realize
to-day, in view of our familiarity with these matters, what
a stir this must have made ; for though tuberculosis,
despite its protean manifestations in the different organs of
the body, was beginning to be understood with the aid
of the microscope, without the discovery of the bacterial
agent the ‘ tubercle ’ apparent to the naked eye would have
remained as the characteristic lesion of ‘ consumption ’ of
tissue, whether of the lungs, bones, joints, or glands.

That a young English chemist, William Henry Perkin,
in 1856 had become interested in the by-products of coal-tar
and discovered ‘ mauve the first of the aniline dyes ; that
German chemists had enormously developed these dyes ;
that a particular one should have been found to have an
affinity for the tubercle bacillus, a hitherto unknown and
unsuspected organism ; that Koch had the imagination to
devise the necessary combination of dyes, the intelligence
to realize the significance of his discovery, and the genius
which enabled him subsequently to cultivate the minute
rods shorter than the diameter of a red blood-corpuscle —
all this is a serial story well known, and the world looks
forward with expectancy to the final chapter, the practical
eradication of the ‘white plague’, one of its greatest scourges.

Koch’s celebrated address in which he first gave proof
that tuberculosis was a highly infectious bacterial disease
affecting both man and animals, was delivered before the
Physiological Society in Berlin on March 24th.’- It was
reported in fuU in the June issue of Ross’s journal, and in
the July number there occurs a note to the effect that at
the McGill Physiological Laboratory Professor Osier before
the class of senior students successfully demonstrated the
presence of the organism in the lung of a man who had died
of rapid general tuberculosis.

Osier’s microscopic leanings, as has been indicated, were
chiefly towards the morphological elements of the blood ;
his studies of communicable diseases were chiefly devoted
to those due to animal parasites, of a far higher order than
the bacteria ; and though his interest in bacteriology was
^ Berliner kUntsche Wochenschrtfty i88a, 2cix. 221-30.

200

Last Years in Montreal Aug.-Oct. 1882

sufficiently acute to make him quick to confirm Koch’s
discovery, his inexperience with bacteriological technique
rendered him incapable of pursuing the subject farther.

Koch’s celebrated address ended with the statement that
when the idea of the infectious nature of tuberculosis had
taken root among physicians the means of warfare suited
to contend with this enemy would be elaborated. It was
along these lines that Osier’s subsequent work in connexion
with tuberculosis mainly lay, and in later years he became
one of the chief leaders in the antituberculosis crusade.
But even prior to Koch’s pronouncement he had seen the
light. For as Dr. Duncan McEachran recalls,^ at one
of the early meetings of the ‘Medico-Chi.’ after he had
given an address on the contagious character of bovine
tuberculosis. Osier expressed the opinion that tuberculosis
was spread by contagion in the human species also and
advocated a campaign to popularize this view. But it was
urged by others that this would merely cause public alarm
and that the apparent hereditary character of the disease
could sufficiently well account for its occurrence in the
several members of a family.^

In August the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, as prearranged, met in Montreal under the
presidency of Principal Dawson. Since Osier was on one of
the local committees of arrangement he must have been
kept busy, the more so as he was on the programme to give
certain demonstrations and to read, before the Section on
Histology, three short papers which contained an account
of some of his original observations on the blood. On the
heels of this gathering, the Canadian Medical Association,
of which he was still the General Secretary, held its annual
meeting in Toronto, where he not only read his paper on
Echinococcus Disease,® but also gave a demonstration of the

^ ‘ Osier and th.e Montreal Veterinary College.’ Journal of the Canadian
Medical Association, 1920.

^ The idea of contagion did not reach the public for another twenty years,
not until after the Tuberculosis Congress m London in 1901, on which
occasion McEachran was the representative of Canada, and Osier of the
United States.

^ This paper, ^ On Echinococcus Disease in America was a statistical study
of sixty-one cases gathered from various sources, together with his own

Aet. 33

McGill’s Semi-centennial

201

newly discovered bacilli of anthrax and tuberculosis ; and
one may feel sure that the spirit of James Bovell hovered
over the microscopes through which they were shown. It
was said to have been the most successful gathering in the
history of the Association, the chief credit of which the
official accounts of the meeting ascribed to the activities of
the General Secretary, for the membership had more than
doubled since he had taken the position.

The semi-centennial of the McGill Medical School fell
in this year of 1882, and Palmer Howard, who had recently
succeeded to the position of Dean on the death of Dr. G. W.
Campbell, arranged to recognize the occasion suitably,
invitations being issued to all graduates. On the evening
of October 4th the assembly gathered in the large lecture-
room of the new Peter Redpath Museum — ^he of the
acupuncture episode. There were the usual receptions and
dinners customary at such celebrations, and Howard made
the announcement of a promise from an anonymous donor,
who proved to be Donald A. Smith (later Lord Strathcona),
of $50,000 for an endowment, provided a like amount could
be raised by August 1883. Osier promptly wrote an
enthusiastic letter to H. V. Ogden, saying that ‘ the Festival
was a grand success — and prospects are good of the 100,000.’
Ogden had graduated in the spring, and though Rogers
had a successor, a Mr. Cantlie, the household at 1351
St. Catherine Street ultimately broke up a short time before
Puller’s marriage. For a time Osier lived on Dorchester
Street with Arthur Browne (by now Professor of Midvidfery
in the School) and temporarily also with the cousins on
McGill College Avenue. He was apparently paying court
at this time to a young lady, whose father is said to have
objected to a son-in-law with agnostic leanings and no
visible means of support. However this may be, letters
from the cousins to Ogden say that ‘ he is most scrupulous
in his get-up, a beaver hat on all occasions and an extremely
fashionable London importation for particular ones ! The
important question of “ to be or not to be ” is not settled
yet, so donH congratulate him.’’ It was not to be.

personal observations. He signs himself as ‘ Lecturer on Helminthology,
Montreal Veterinary College Cf. American Journal of the Medical ScienceSy
Oct. 1882, Ixxxiv. 475-80.

202

Last Years in Montreal jan- June 1883

In January 1883 a firm of medical publishers in Phila-
delphia, Henry C. Lea’s Son & Co., transformed the old
Medical News, a monthly publication which had been going
for forty years, into a weekly paper in the quarto format
of the Lancet. Dr. Minis Hays continued to be the Editor
and he made it a feature of the journal to give abstracts of
the proceedings of the more important medical societies :
the New York Pathological Society, the Philadelphia
Academy, the New York Academy of Medicine, the
Medico-Chirurgical Society of Montreal, and so on, being
included. Osier was asked to be the Montreal correspon-
dent, so that during the next two years the frequent ‘ Mon-
treal Notes ’ and the abstracts of the proceedings of the
local society were written by him. His connexion with the
Medical News in this capacity had some bearing on his
subsequent call to Philadelphia.^

He had expected to go abroad for another period of study
on the Continent in 1883, but for some reason, possibly
because of difficulties which had arisen between the students
and the teacher of materia medica whose resignation
they demanded, this trip was postponed. His assistant,
who does not appear to have made himself very popular
with the students, was sent in his stead. Another trouble
which the school faced at this time was due to the custom
of ‘ body-snatching ’ for anatomical material, and it was
not until Shepherd succeeded in getting a proper anatomical
law through the Quebec Legislature that this practice
and the disturbances it occasioned abated. It must have
seemed to Osier, with the multitude of local activities with
which he had become connected, that he was likely to be-
come more and more firmly anchored as time went on.

In June he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College
of Physicians of London, an honour which he mentions
off-hand in this letter to Ogden :

To H. V. Ogden from W. 0 . 30/6/83.

Dear Ogden, Very glad to get your letter and to hear that you
are progressing. Oddly enough I was on the Mountain this after-

^ Osier was not unknown to Philadelphia, for he had been there m 1881
on one of his periodic tours ‘ to look over the museums and hospitals ’ ; had
met, and been impressed by, Pepper ; and had visited Tyson. Cf. Philadel-
phia Medical Journal, 1899, iii. 607-11.

Act. 33

RR.aR

203

noon and met Mrs Barnard with a troop of friends and among
them the lady you mentioned. I shall call tomorrow or the day
after. Things here are pretty quiet, but the changes, as you will
see by the announcement — to be mailed on Tuesday — have been
numerous, and I hope for the improvement of the teaching in the
school. Stewart will be a great acquisition. He is still in Vienna
but will return in time. A. A. Browne and Gardner will make
a good pair for Obst. & Gynecology. Penhallow, Asa Gray’s
assistant, takes Dr D’s botany lectures this winter. Dr D. goes
abroad for a year. That blooming Y.C.M.R.D. is in Winnipeg
looking after Convention practice. We are joyful in the prospect
of the $100,000 endowment. We have $40,000 of the $50,000
necessary to secure the equivalent sum from our anonymous friend.
BuUer keeps well : he has moved to a mansion on Dorchester St.
I am next door, i.e. in Browne’s, until his return and then I dont
know where I shall go — perhaps with Stewart. R. J. B. H[oward]
comes out in Oct. to take the Jr. Dem. of Anatomy. He has passed
the Primary of the F.R.C.S. Did you hear that the R.C.P. Lond.
had honoured me by electing me a Fellow? I feel very grateful, as
my period of probation as a member (5 years) had scarcely expired.
All are well at No. 66. The children are very jolly and often talk
of you. Willie, only this evening, was laughing at the remembrance
of giving you the mumps. Tell Dorland I will send him a formal
invitation to the C.M.A. meeting — also the other Dr. The papers
will be most acceptable. Write again soon.

The Royal College of Physicians — ^ R.C.P. Lond.’ — of
which he had already become a member by taking the
examinations in 1878, is probably the most ancient society
of physicians in Europe, its charter having been granted by
Henry VIII in 1518. It was founded by the king’s three
physicians, the leader of whom, Linacre, ^ a disciple of the
new learning brought from Italy ’, was one of Osier’s chief
heroes of medicine. The reaction which this election had
upon his Canadian colleagues is reflected in many fulsome
notes which appeared in all the journals of the Dominion
containing felicitations on ^ a distinction which few men
of Dr. Osier’s age attain and which is now held by only
two resident Canadians of any age

As usual, the early summer was punctuated with medical

^ By a coincidence another F.R.C.P. elected at this time was a physician
of Leeds, Clifford Allbutt, a man several years Osier’s senior. In course
of time the two came to be the Regius Professors of Medicine, respectively,
of Cambridge and Oxford.

204 Years in Montreal juty-Sept. 1883

gatherings. Thus July nth finds him at Quebec with Ross
for the triennial meeting of the College of Physicians and
Surgeons of the Province, held at Laval University ; and
as he says in one of his ^ Montreal Notes ’ to the Medical
NewSy ‘ no little excitement at the time prevailed among the
French-Canadian members of the profession regarding the
disestablishment of the Montreal branch of this college
which finally had been settled by a Papal decree ’ in favour
of Montreal. Later in the summer he was again with
H. P. Bowditch at the Adirondack camp, and a letter of
August 29th tells of a ^ scramble to the top of Beede’s Falls,
and along the cliffs towards the Washbowl It may have
been during this outing that he read with unconcealed
delight the third volume of John Brown’s ^ Spare Hours
and immediately set himself to write a review of the essays
for the Medical News. To hand on a book he had enjoyed,
either as the volume itself or through a review calling
attention to it, became a fixed habit with him, and as this
appears to have been his first published book-review it
deserves passing attention :

Its American title [he said] is a rather unhappy translation of the
au thorns Horae Suhsecivae^ but the ‘ pith and marrow ’ is just as
good under one name as another. The general popularity of the
first two volumes is such that ‘ Rab and his Friends ’ is now an
English classic, and few of our readers, we trust, are not friends of
^ Marjorie Fleming with her ^ Newgate calendar of all the criminals
as ever was hung ’, or are ignorant of the ‘ Mystery of Black and
Tan or the splendid description of Chalmers, or the loving tribute
to his father. The present recent volume — and we must add the
last we shall ever have from his accomplished pen, now, alas ! laid
aside for ever — contains mostly purely professional papers, and as
such will interest us all as physicians. Most of us would take excep-
tion to the genial doctor’s conviction ‘ that a mediciner should be
as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a mole-catcher ’, but
all surely will be with him in his plea for ^ the cultivation and con-
centration of the unassisted senses This phrase is the key-note,
indeed, to most of the volume. We are apt, amidst our learning and
our scientific observations, to forget that the ear, the eye, and the
hand are after all the chief avenues of knowledge, and to neglect
their finer cultivation in our eagerness to learn the mysteries of all
our ^ scopes ’ and our reagents. We need the exferienUa as well
as the exferimenta. And it comes with peculiar force from one
who is such an exuberant classical scholar that his Latin and his

A Denunciation

Aet. 34

205

quotations from the older English classics overflow on almost every
page. . .

What John Brown had written of Dr. Adams of Banchory,
and of Locke, and of Sydenham ‘ the Prince of English
Physicians, at the mention of whose name Boerhaave
invariably removed his hat ’ may have been still in his mind
when in September he attended the annual meeting of the
C.M.A. in Kingston. For an episode occurred there during
one of the sessions, which concerned the ‘ General Secretary ’,
who made clear what were his feelings regarding the proper
relations of one physician to another. The official report

of the meeting states that a certain Dr. D read a paper

on ‘ The Conduct of Medical Men towards each other and
towards each other’s Patients in which he scoffed at the
custom requiring a new-comer to call on those already
settled in the place ; claimed it was perfectly justifiable to
report one’s cases of operation or extraordinary cures in the
papers ; and went on to say : ‘ Take all the cases you can
get, and keep them if you can without reference to the
previous attendant.’ ^ There were a few occasions, some
of which will be referred to later, when Osier became, for
righteous reasons, greatly worked up, and this was one of
them. It is said that on the conclusion of this amazing
paper he arose and, to the consternation of his fellows,
waved a copy of the Code of Ethics in the reader’s face and
publicly denounced him.

Meanwhile, during this summer the trouble with the
McGill students over the professorship of Materia Medica
had been settled largely through Osier’s intermediation,
by the resignation of the former incumbent and the appoint-
ment of Dr. James Stewart in his place.® On Stewart’s
return from a sojourn in Vienna he and Osier lived together

^ Medical News, Phila , Sept. 8, 1883, xlm. 273. Arthur Browne had
given Osier a copy of the ‘Horae Subsecivae’ in London in 1872. Cf.

‘ Bibhotheca Osleriana ’ (in press).

^ Cf. Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, 1883-4, ^^ 7 *

^ An amusing account of this student protest against an incompetent
teacher occurs in an undergraduate publication, the McGill University
Gazette (May i, 1883, vi. 7). It contains a note about a ‘scribe short of
stature but of a mighty understanding ’ evidently meaning the Registrar.
The article purports to have been found by ‘ Damphino Cook, B S., Zn Cl^ +
HgS \ the efEcient Janitor of McGill College Medical School,

2 o6 Last Years in Montreal Oct. -Dec. 1883

in T, G. Roddick’s house during a European trip Roddick
had taken in his turn. Stewart, though an able and industri-
ous colleague, was a most silent man, of whom his house-mate
was accustomed to say that he never could tell whether
‘ Jim ’ Stewart had the gift or the infirmity of reticence ;
but it was a pleasanter home and better quarters than
Osier’s previous ones. Roddick had recently become
co-editor with Ross of the Canada Medical and Surgical
Journal, and during his absence Osier evidently took over
for him the task of preparing the editorials, for some of
them, like that on ‘ Doctors’ Signs ’ already quoted, are
unmistakably his.

With Palmer Howard and F. W. Campbell he attended
the centennial celebration of the Harvard Medical School
on October 17th, at which time Oliver Wendell Holmes
gave the memorable address ^ in which, when speaking of
the three founders of the school, John Warren, Waterhouse,
and Aaron Dexter who was Professor of Chemistry, he
mentioned the ‘ Settee of Professorships ’. He told the
following story of Dexter which must have amused Osier,
who himself was conscious of the difficulties in making
a class experiment do what it should :

It is sad to think that professors honoured in their day and genera-
tion should often be preserved only by such poor accidents as a
sophomore’s jest or a graduate’s anecdote. The apparatus of illustra-
tion was doubtless very imperfect in Dr. Dexter’s time, compared
to what is seen in all the laboratories of to-day. We may admire his
philosophy and equanimity therefore, in recalling the story I used
to hear about him. ‘ This experiment, gentlemen ’, he is repre-
sented as saying, ‘ is one of remarkable brilliancy. As I touch the
powder you see before me, with a drop of this fluid, it bursts into
a sudden and brilliant flame ’, which it most emphatically does not
do as he makes the contact. ‘ Gentlemen ’, he says, with a serene
smile, ‘ the experiment has failed ; but the principle, gentlemen, —
the principle remains firm as the everlasting hills.’ ^

‘ The New Century and the New Building of the Medical School of
Harvard University.’ Medical News, Phila., Oct. 20, 1883, xliii. 421.

® In an unsigned article (‘ The Harvard Centennial.’ Canada Medical
and Surgical Journal, 1883-4, obviously from Osier’s pen, he speaks

of the stand which Harvard, under the leadership of Charles W. Eliot, had
taken in reforming ‘ the lax and imperfect system of medical education which
prevails in_the States ’.

Aet. 34 Studying Endocarditis 207

During this autumn and the winter of 1883-4 the usual
miscellany of case reports was read before the ‘Medico-Chi,’,
including the exhibition of further post-mortem specimens
from the Veterinary College. Before the naturalists, too,
on October 29th, he gave a paper on the comparative
anatomy of ‘ The Brain of the Seal ’, illustrated by many
prepared specimens of the brains of various animals.^ But
aside from these diversions he was industriously at work all
this time over his endocarditis preparations, and a note-book
of the period contains innumerable drawings of his histo-
logical preparations of the diseased valves showing the
vegetations and their bacterial content, accompanied by
pages of written description in pencil, now almost illegible.
He had come to believe that this serious disease of the
heart- valves was invariably bacterial in origin ; and it was
this clinical and pathological material which formed the
basis of his Goulstonian Lectures in 1885. He made a few
inoculation experiments and stained the organisms in the
tissues ; but his real contribution lay in the assembly of facts
and in his graphic picture of the disease, which made it
understandable and recognizable by the general profession.
It must be recalled that secondary endocarditis may occur
in a number of diseases and he had attacked an experimental
problem far more complicated even than that concerned
with the bacterial origin of pneumonia, the relation of
which to a specific organism, despite Fr&nkel’s and Fried-
lander’s descriptions, had not as yet been fully established.

Osier’s parents by this time, owing to Canon Osier’s
retirement, had moved from Dundas to Toronto, where
their elder children had settled, and it was there he joined
them for the holidays. Otherwise Christmas dinner would
have found him at the Howards’, where his special friends
of the younger generation were ‘ growing like gossip ’, as his
cousin Jennette is quoted as saying. For gossip, however,
we must have recourse to letters other than those signed
‘ W. O.’, and his house-mate Cantlie sends Ogden a long
account of this particular Christmas dinner, which says that
‘ Mrs. Howard, excepting perhaps Miss J ennette Osier and

^ Cf. Proceedings of the Natural History Society. Canada Record of
Science^ 1884, i. 64.

2o8 Last Years in Montreal Dec. 1883

Mrs. Francis, is the cleverest and most brilliant woman I
have met, nor have I ever seen a little girl of such delightful
manners as little Muriel And he adds ; ‘ Dr. Osier is as
usual at home at this season — but returns next week. I do
wish he would marry some wealthy woman — ’twould be
a great boon to him.’ Though from hearsay there was
ample opportunity. Osier apparently had no intention of
immediately following the example of ‘ the Landlord

CHAPTER X

1884

EUROPE ; AND THE PHILADELPHIA CALL

In January there appeared an unsigned editorial in Ross’s
journal^ ^ On the University Question unmistakably from
Osier’s pen, in which he urges increased efficiency, better
laboratories, better-paid professors and assistants in all
medical schools — ^ men placed above the worries and
vexations of practice, whose time will be devoted solely
to investigating the subjects they profess The following
paragraph from this editorial has a very prophetic ring :

It is one thing to know thoroughly and be able to teach well any
given subject in a college, it is quite another thing to be able to take
up that subject and by original work and investigation add to our
stock of knowledge concerning it, or throw light upon the dark
problems which may surround it. Many a man, pitchforked, so to
speak, by local exigencies into a professional position has done the
former well, but unless a man of extraordinary force he cannot
break the invidious bar of defective training which effectually shuts
him off from the latter and higher duties of his position. We have,
however, many men in our colleges with good records as investi-
gators, and we hear from them but seldom on account of the excessive
drudgery of teaching which the restricted means of their college
compel them to undertake. The instances are few indeed in our
universities in which a professor has but a single subject to deal
with, and those which do exist are in subjects of great extent and
often subdivided in other colleges. In looking over the list of
branches taught by a single professor in some of our colleges, we may
indeed say with Dr. O. W Holmes that he does not occupy a chair
but an entire settee. If Canadian scholarship is to be fostered, if
progress in science is to be made, this condition of things must be
remedied, and we may confidently hope will be, as years roll on. . , .
But unless the liberality of individuals is manifested in the manner
of the late Mr. Johns Hopkins of Baltimore, we shall have to wait
long for a fully equipped Canadian university. The Government of
Ontario, however, has now the opportunity to put Toronto Uni-
versity on a proper basis, and do a great work for the intellectual life
of this country. And it can consistently do so, as the Institution is
a State foundation and is under State control, and the condition of
the local Exchequer is plethoric. . .

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ Jan 1884, xii. 373.

P

2923 I

210

Six Months in Europe Spring 1884

‘ Pitchforked by local exigencies as he himself had been,
into the ‘ settee ’ of the Institutes of Medicine at McGill,
Osier was doubtless fully conscious of his handicap. A well-
endowed chair with the single subject of pathology to deal
with wmuld unquestionably have kept him in Montreal or
taken him to Toronto or anywhere else just at this time —
Dis aliter visum ; and it was probably the better for medicine
that it was so willed.

In a letter written to E. A. Schafer early in the preceding
autumn, stating that ‘ a barrel of apples (var. Northern
Spy) left to-day per SS. Polynesian for Liverpool ’, he
made known his intention to spend the coming summer in
Europe. It was to be one of his periodic breaks ‘ from the
excessive drudgery of teaching ’. His plans by early spring
had matured, and he wnites of them again to Schafer, who
evidently was expecting to attend the coming meeting in
Montreal of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science. Of this body Osier seems to have been the
local representative, for he says : ‘ Please send me within
a few weeks the names of those members of the profession —
so far as you know — who intend coming to Canada in
August. I should like to arrange for their proper accommo-
dation ’ ; and he goes on to give details of railway arrange-
ments, with trips to the Rockies and elsewhere. ‘ I am
afraid we shall' not have much to show you here. You
will be interested in Bowditch’s and Warthin’s labora-
tories, the only good ones on the continent.’ And in a
postcript he adds : ‘ I was nearly forgetting the most
important point. I am breaking-up home and my arrange-
ments for the autumn are as yet uncertain.’ Little did he
realize how uncertain they actually were. In company with
Palmer Howard’s son Jared, who had recently been made
a demonstrator in anatomy in Shepherd’s department, he
sailed on March 26th for Bremen, where apparently his
first act was to buy the Tauchnitz edition of ‘ The Auto-
crat ’ ; and the copy, stiU in his library, thoroughly
perused and annotated, saw them through to Berlin. It is
possible to trace their footsteps by the series of medical
and surgical letters (most of them unsigned) sent back to
Ross for publication. In April he wrote from Berlin his

Aet. 34

Letters from Berlin

21 I

^ Instalment No. I in which he comments on the trans-
formation of Berlin during the ten years since his last
visit, on the new drainage system, the changes in the
Faculty, the new hospitals, and the ^palatial’ laboratory
buildings on Dorotheen Strasse which he could see from his
windows.

To E. A. Schafer from W, 0 . 2 Neue Wilhelm Strasse,

May 1st [1884].

Dear Schafer, — ... I shall be very glad to go to Elstree for a shoit
time but I must go first to some friends in Russell Sq. for a week.
I am afraid my lawn tennis days are over but you may tell Mrs.
Schafer that I am susceptible as ever — therein lies my safety — and
shall be delighted to meet the young lady. I have seen Kronecker
seveial times and he has showed me one or two very interesting
things — particularly the experiment of permanently arresting the
vent 7 icular action by puncture of a small spot in the upper part of
the septum vent. Mills is here working with him and also with
Hoffmann and Salkowsld. He is delighted with Strassburg. I hope
in October to hand him over the Physiology and to another the
Histology and have only the Pathology. I shall leave here about
the first of July — possibly to go to Leipzig for a few days.

On this same day (May ist) he got off his second open
letter, describing the German Surgical Congress at which
he heard Theodor Kocher’s paper on cachexia strumapriva
— in other words on the peculiar symptoms which may
occasionally follow the operative removal of goitre. In
solving the mysteries of the disorder known as myxoedema,
this represented the first forward step to be taken since
Ord’s demonstration, which Osier had also attended in
London three years before. But aside from this, the fact
that he should have been sufficiently interested in a congress
of surgeons to attend the meetings and describe what he
had seen and heard is of no little significance.^ The follow-

^ Cafiada Medtcal and Surgical Journal^ May 1884, xii. 582.

2 There can be little doubt but that the sound surgical judgement,
unusual for a physician and for which he was justly celebrated, was due to his
early habit of attending surgical as well as medical meetings, and of reporting
them in full In his accounts not only of the Medico-Chirurgical Society
for the Medical Nem^ but also of the Dominion association meetings of
which he was recorder, his abstracts of the surgical papers and discussions
were apt to be as thorough and full as were those in his own subjects.

212 Six Months in Europe May 1884

ing characteristic scribble on a postcard, which chance has
preserved, was soon forwarded to George Ross :

i6th [May 1884, Berlin].

How are you oS for letters ? You have one for the June No.
perhaps 2 — as No. l probably did not get out in time for the May
Journal tho’ I se^it it on the 15th April. I [shall] send on the i8th
a description of the Koch dinner which might perhaps go after the
Surg. Congress letter as it would be rather stale to keep for July No.
Why the d. have you not written. What a slovenly careless forgetting
unconscionable set of brutes you are — Have not had the Journal yet.
If the Koch dinner cannot go in, do not keep it until July, send it
to A H Wright, Toronto, as I shall have a good letter for the July
No. Hope everything is flourishing. Yours See., W. O.

The third letter, sent two days later as promised, describes
the official dinner in honour of Robert Koch, whose party
had just returned from the expedition sent out to India
to investigate the bacterial origin of cholera :

It must, indeed, have been a proud moment for the whilom
district physician, Robert Koch, on the evening of the 13th inst,,
when some 500 of his brethren met to do him honour on his return
from India and Egypt. The reception was, as remarked to me by
one of the privat-docents, unprecedented, and unparalleled in Berlin.
It was, indeed, a gay festival. , . . Prof. Bergmann, after greeting
the guest of the evening, and congratulating the commission on its
safe return, referred to the pride which all felt, from the Kaiser to
the lowest citizen, at the fresh honours to German science which
had resulted from Koch’s labours. ^ It was not ’, he said, ^ the
courage with which you went forth to investigate the fatal plague
which we admire. Many of those about me have done the same
thing. He [Virchow] who went to Sperrat and Schliessen, to the
typhus epidemic, threw his life on the hazard just as much as the
man who examined the bodies of cholera patients in the dirty huts
by the Ganges, The device of our profession is that of the candle —

ahts seamens ipse consumorr , . , Who does not know how often the
spirit of a country physician is broken, and his thinking powers
weakened by the endless round of visits. The reality of the wagon-
rattle fits badly with the ideal of scientific work. But the district
physician of Wollstein knew how to glean some hours from the
restless and driving activity of practice, and in the space of ten
years has concluded the series of brilliant observations from the
discovery of the spores of the bacillus anthracis to that of the bacillus
of cholera,’

These extracts will give but a feeble idea of Prof. Bergmann’s
stirring address. . . . Dr. Koch’s reply was extremely modest : he

Aet. 34 Koch and Virchow 213

claimed only to have discovered improved methods of observation.
He believed that one important result of the commission would be,
if the English Government gave proper assistance, the limitation of
the cholera to its native place in India. . . . His career is particularly
pleasing, and it reminds one of that other country physician who
nearly a century ago made the memorable observations on cow-pox.^

The ^ good letter for the July No. ’ dealt largely with
Virchow, for whom Osier always felt and expressed the
most profound admiration. He was unquestionably the
outstanding figure in medicine of the day — a man whose
interests extended far beyond pathology, in which his first
great contributions to medical science had been made ; and
knowing of his anthropological leanings Osier had taken
him as a present some Indian skulls from British Columbia.
The letter begins thus :

The central figure of the Berlin Faculty is Virchow. . . . After
20 years of teaching, it is but natural that he should have much of
the drudgery done by his able assistants, Drs. Jurgens, Grawitz and
Israel, who conduct the autopsies and the courses on pathological
histology. Students have, however, still the great privilege of
hearing him in three different classes, and at il a.m. each day he
gives a lecture on special pathology. . . . The other morning I could
not but feel what a privilege it was again to listen to the principles
of thrombosis and embolism expounded by the great master, to
whose researches we owe so much of our knowledge on these subjects.

Politics and anthropology absorb the greater part of his time.
He is a member both of the German Parliament and of the Prussian
House of Representatives, and I noticed a day or so ago in one of
the daily papers an item stating the number of times that each
member spoke — I forget in which House — that Virchow had spoken
on 38 occasions during the session. It need scarcely be stated that
he is an advanced liberal. He is also a member of the City Council
— not an idle one either, as the copious literature of the canalization
(drainage) system of the city can testify, and I notice that he has
been again urging the further extension of the sewers. His archaeo-
logical and anthropological studies are at present most extensive,
and it is upon these subjects now that he chiefly writes. When one
turns to the index of authors in the volumes of Transactions of the
Berlin Archaeological Society the figures after his name stand thick
and deep, just as they do in a similar index in medical works. He

^ ‘ The Koch Dinner.’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ June 1884,
XU. 677. Another even more detailed account of the occasion was sent to
Mims Hays for the Medical Nem, June 7, 1884, xlv. 687,

214 Six Months in Europe May 1884

has been collaborator with Dr. Schliemann in several of the important
works issued on Trojan antiquities. His collection of skulls and
skeletons of different races, one of the most important in Europe,
will doubtless find an appropriate place in the new Archaeological
Museum erected hy the Government. At present, his private rooms
are a sort of Gehenna, which has laid every quarter of the globe
under contribution. The very day on which I gave him four choice
skulls of North American Indians from Prof. Bell’s collection, two
large cases of skeletons of the natives of Madeira were brought in.
There are those who grudge him the time which he thus spends
on politics and his favourite studies, but surely he has earned a repose
from active pathological work, and may well leave section-cutting
and bacteria-staining to the smaller fry ; and when we consider
that in addition to the classes above mentioned he is President of
the Berlin Medical Society, and edits his Archiv^ now a monthly
journal, it can scarcely be said that he neglects professional duties.
On all questions of general, medical and scientific interest, his utter-
ances are not infrequent, and display a judicious conservatism — as
witness his sound position regarding the Darwinian theory as opposed
to the vagaries of Haeckel. . . .

The same letter contains an account of Frerichs, who had
^ renewed his youth with the recent jubilee and astonished
his medical friends by the production of a monograph
on Diabetes ’ ; and he goes on to describe Leyden’s,
WestphaPs, and Henoch’s clinics at the Charite ; nor does
he neglect meanwhile his public health interests, for he
mentions a visit to the Royal Veterinary College, under
Government control where ^ there is much better teaching,
and altogether a more scientific tone than is the case in English
or American institutions of the kind.’ The abattoir also
was visited and he was ^ able to see the admirable system of
inspection of flesh, as well as to secure a number of valuable
specimens illustrating the commoner morbid and parasitic
appearances ’d The letter closed with this charitable
comment on the Semitic invasion of Berlin :

The modern ^ hef^ hefy hef ’ shrieked in Berlin for some years
past has by no means died out, and to judge from the tone of several

^ Before the Pathological Society of Philadelphia on Sept. 24, 1885, he
subsequently alluded to these visits as follows : ‘ The liver fluke, Distoma
hefattcumy so common in Europe, is not very often met with m sheep and
cattle in this country, and in my experience it is rare to find here the advanced
changes described in works on parasites. When in Berlin in 1884 I spent two
afternoons of each week at the abattoir, which owing to the elaborate system

Aet 34 The Jewish Question 215

of the papers devoted to the Jewish question there are not wanting
some who would gladly revert to the plan adopted on the Nile
some thousands of years ago for solving the Malthusian problem of
Semitic increase. Doubtless there were then, as now, noisy agitators
— prototypes of the Parson Stocker — who clamoured for the hard
laws which ultimately prevailed, and for the taskmasters whose
example so many Gentile generations have willingly followed, of
demanding where they safely could, bricks without straw of their
Israelitish brethren. Should another Moses arise and preach a Semitic
exodus from Germany, and should he prevail, they would leave the
land impoverished far more than was ancient Egypt by the loss of
the ‘ jewels of gold and jewels of silver ’ of which the people were
spoiled To say nothing of the material wealth— enough to buy
Palestine over and over again from the Turk — there is not a pro-
fession which would not suffer the serious loss of many of its most
brilliant ornaments and in none more so than in our own. I hope
to be able to get the data with reference to the exact number of
professors and docents of Hebrew extraction in the German Medical
Faculties. The number is very great, and of those I know their
positions have been won by hard and honourable work ; but I fear
that, as I hear has already been the case, the present agitation will
help to make the attainment of university professorships additionally
difficult. One cannot but notice here, in any assembly of doctors,
the strong Semitic element ; at the local societies and at the German
Congress of Physicians it was particularly noticeable, and the
same holds good in any collection of students. All honour to
them ! ^

Another long letter, to A. H. Wright for the Toronto
journal,^ was sent the following month from Berlin. In
this an account was given of the Congress of German
Physicians which opened on May 2oth with Frerichs as
President, and which drew a distinguished gathering as it
coincided with the festival in his honour. There was much,
as would be expected, of infectious diseases and their rela-
tion to micro-organisms, for new discoveries were being

of inspection, both ante- and post-mortem, offers one of the best fields in
Europe for the study of comparative pathology and helnunthology ; and
through the kindness of Dr. Her twig I was enabled to secure a large number
of interesting specimens.’ tans actions of the Pathological Society , Phila.,
1887, xiii 222-4.)

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, July 1884, xh. 721-8. Following
this letter, signed ‘ W. O.’, is another signed ‘ R J. B H.’, who writes about
von Bergmann’s clinic and describes the antiseptic methods in vogue there.

^ The Canadian Practitioner, 1884, ix. 184.

2i6

Six Months in Europe June 1884

announced like corn popping in a pan. Friedlander was
Mesent, and recounted new experiments with pneumonia ;
Frankel described the pneumococcus, the relation of which
to the disease was not as yet generally accepted ; and
Loeffler gave a 7 esume of the diphtheria question, with
experimental support for the Klebs bacillus as the cause of
the disease.^ However, in spite of Osier’s regard for Virchow
and all that Berlin offered, the subsequent sojourn in
Leipzig aroused his enthusiasm still more, for there he made
his debut into bacteriology. But the time, alas, was too
short, and he was a little late in getting a start in this field
which with his early botanical and microscopical training
would have fascinated him. Another year in Montreal,
particularly if he could have lived under the roof of his
laboratory ’, might have seen him an active worker in the
aetiology of the infectious diseases.

To George Rossjroin W. 0 . Leipzig, Wednesday lOth [June],
Dear Ross, Journal of May & your letter came on Monday —
Glad to have them. April No never turned up. Have written to
Bastian, Hope he will come but he wrote to me saying that he could
not. Shall be most happy to play distinguished stranger at 49 Union
Ave [Ross’s address in Montreal], Came here last — ^very glad. Wish
I had done so at first as everything is most ange 7 iehm in Cohnheim’s 2
Laboratory. Weigert is in charge, C. being ill with gouty nephritis.
I go there at 8 a m, work until 10.30 at Bacteria, then go to Leuckart’s ^
laboratory until i p.m. when I dine & return to Weigert ^ or go
to Zurn’s assistant at the Veterinary School. Wagner’s ® Med. Clinic
here is good. I have not yet been to Flechsig. The buildings here
are very convenient. I am living opposite the Zoologisches InsUtiit —
very comfortable pension — ^much more so than the Berlin one &
at 2/3 s the cost. Lord 1 dont I wish I could live all the year round
for 120 marks a month (beer included). Were it not for books &:c.
it would be a great economy to live abroad all the year. I have
asked Howard to get a little inner room rigged up for the Koch

^ It may be noted that in Paris on the date of the opemng of this Berlin
Congress, Pasteur read before the Academte de Medectne his paper announcing
the discovery of the virus of hydrophobia and a method of protecting
against it.

^ Juhus Cohnheim, Prof, of Pathological Anatomy.

® Carl Leuckart, Prof, of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy.

^ Karl Weigert became Cohnheim’s successor in 1884.

^ Ernst Wagner after a training in pathology became Director of the
Medical Chnic on Wunderlich’s death in 1877.

Aet. 34 A Start in Bacteriology 217

apparatus which we ought to have so that we could have some
cultures under way when the Association is there. I shall try to
bring out some cultuies wh. will do for stock — The only trouble
is that the heat may destroy them. I do hope the Faculty will be
able to arrange for Mills Sc myself to live at the College, How
I envy some of these men ’ Leuckart has about $4,000 a year,
with a splendid set of apartments on the 3rd floor of the Institut.
It seems comisch at first to see the upper flats devoted to the families
of the professors and assistants but it saves time and money. Perhaps
next summer the Governors might put a double mansard on and
give me the upper one. Glad to hear from Dick MacDonneU that
a telephone has been put in the College. Have a letter half ready —
will be out by 1st & a Leipzig one will do for August. Hope the
Surg. Congress one Sc Koch dinner are both in this No. If that
letter came too late dont put it in the July No. as it wiU be very
stale. Glad to hear of the preparation for the C.M.A. Lawson Tait
will give an address on abd. Surg. Sc I have asked Sanderson (with
Muhin’s consent) to give one on Medicine. I have had no word
from him yet tho it is some weeks since I wrote. Shah write again.

I leave here July 12th. Bk. of Montreal or 25 Russell Sq. will find
me in London. Let me know if I can bring out anything. I shah
send out a couple of trunks from here. This writing is awful, but
the pen is worse.

The last of his series of letters ^ to Ross’s journal opens
with a description of the medical conditions in Leipzig ;
of Cohnheim’s pathological institute, and the illness of its
distinguished chief ; and then passes on to his assistant as
follows :

The charge of the laboratory is virtuahy with Professor Weigert
to whom medicine is under a deep debt of obligation for the intro-
duction of the use of aniline dyes in histological work, as well as
for the unravelling of many knots in pathological histology. He is
a model of industry — first at work in the mormng, last to leave at
night — extremely affable and attentive, qualities which go so far to
make one’s stay in a laboratory comfortable and agreeable. I know
of no place where a man can better work at pathological histology.
. . . The medical clinic is in charge of Professor Wagner. . . . His
method and manner remind one of Traube, which in my opinion is
one of the highest compliments to pay a teacher From 9.45 to

II a.m. instruction is given upon cases brought into the theatre,
usually three or four each day. At the beginning of the lecture new

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journaly Aug. 1884, xm. 18-22. (Signed
^ W. O.’)

2i8

Six Months in Europe June 1884

cases are given out to the students, who go to the wards and make
out the history, &c., and then, when one of their cases is brought
before the class, the student whose case it is goes into the arena and
states the prominent features and makes the diagnosis. The physical
examination is made by the student, and then a general summary is
given to the class, with the necessary explanatory remarks. We all
know how apt this method is — in some hands — to be dry and weari-
some ; details are obtained slowly by the student, and I have seen
a class thoroughly tired, the professor irritated, and half-an-hour
consumed in getting primary facts. Professor Wagner seems to get
the details quickly, and the students appeared to me to be very
much brighter than those at Berlin. To students coming to Germany
for post-graduate study I would most strongly recommend them to
take a semester at this clinic. For the general practice which nine-
tenths of doctors ultimately engage in, it is worth any dozen special
courses that I know of. . . . Probably the most notable figure in medical
Leipzig is Prof. Ludwig, Director of the Physiological Institute,
and the Nestor of German physiologists. Indeed he has a higher
claim than this, for when the history of experimental physiology is
written his name will stand pre-eminent with those of Magendie
and Claude Bernard. He is now an old man, with bodily vigour
somewhat abated, but mentally fresh and suggestive as ever. He
has the honour of having trained a larger number of physiologists
than any other living teacher , his pupils are scattered the world
over, and there is scarcely a worker of note in Europe — bar France —
who has not spent some time in his laboratory. ... It is very hard
to adjust the two great functions of a university, or a part of it, as
represented, say, by such an Institute. The work which shall advance
the science, which brings renown to the professor and to the uni-
versity, is the most attractive and in German laboratories occupies
the chief time of the Director, This function is specially exercised,
and the consequence is that medical literature teems with articles
issued from the various laboratories. On the other hand, the teaching
function of an institute is apt to be neglected in the more seductive
pursuit of the ‘ bauble reputation

So the letter went on ; and after a description of Leuck-
art’s Zoological Institute and of Dr. Zurn, ^ one of the
leading authorities on the diseases of birds it concludes
with a characteristic note regarding his ^ indebtedness to
the University Librarian for many acts of politeness Thus
Virchow, his most distinguished pupil Cohnheim, who died
later in this year, Ludwig, Traube, and Ernst Wagner
(among others who stood in the front rank of the profession
in Germany) all left an indelible mark on Osier’s receptive

Aet. 34 Karl Ludwig's Lament 219

mind in spite of his brief contact with them. Years after-
wards in one of his addresses he said ;

... I was much impressed hy a conveisation with Piofessor Ludwig
in 1884. Speaking of the state of English physiology, he lamented
the lapse of a favouiite English pupil from science to practice ; but
he added : ^ While sorry for him, I am glad for the profession in
England.’ He held that the clinical physicians of that country had
received a very positive impress from the work of their early years
in physiology and the natural sciences. I was suiprised at the list
of names which he cited : among them I remember Bowman,
Savory and Lister. Ludwig attributed this feature in part to the
independent character of the schools in England, to the absence
of the university element so important in medical life in Germany,
but above all to the practical character of the English mind, the
better men preferring an active life in practice to a secluded laboratory
career.^

His sojourn in Leipzig which so delighted him — ^ going
for the bacteria ’ as he expressed it in a letter to Ogden —
was to have a sudden and unexpected end. On the fly-leaf
of his commonplace-book under the date 17/6/84 is the
note, ^ Telegraphed Tyson from Leipzig that I would
accept Professor of Clinical Medicine in the University of
Pennsylvania, Yes And in another place occurs the
provisional draft of a letter in reply to the one evidently
sent by Tyson, May 29th. Two days later came a package
of mail from Montreal, and he writes to both Shepherd
and Ross in similar vein as follows :

Dear Ross, Shepherd forwarded me a letter this week which
played the deuce with my peace of mind. Tyson writes asking me if
I would accept the Chair of Clin. Med. in Univ. of Penn, if appointed.
His letter is quite unofficial & nothing may come of it, but after
much meditation I decided to reply in the affirmative. The tempta-
tion is too great, but the prospect of severing my connexion with
McGill & Montreal gives me no end of worry. However, it may
come to nought, but of course I wrote to H. at once. Now I think,
as I told him, it had better be kept quiet — not let a rumour get
about if possible. It would stir up another Hospital agitation.
Shepherd may possibly have twigged it from the opening sentence
of the letter. I sometimes think it may be a hoax but the matter
of fact communication^ — wh. Howard has — does not look like it.

‘ My heart within me is even like melting wax ’ at the thought of
the possibility of leaving you all.

^ British Medicine m Greater Britain,’ Cf. p. 458.

220 Flipping a Coin June 1884

Shorn of its details, the story as he recounted it years
afterwards may be given in Osier’s own words :

I was resting in a German town when I received a cable from
friends in Philadelphia, stating that if I would accept a professorship
there I should communicate with Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who was in
Europe and who had been empowered to arrange the details. I sat
up late into the night balancing the pros and cons of Montreal and
Philadelphia. In the former I had many friends, I loved the work
and the opportunity was great. In the latter the field appeared
very attractive, but it meant leaving many dear friends. I finally
gave it up as unsolvable and decided to leave it to chance. I flipped
a four-mark silver piece into the air. ^ Heads I go to Philadelphia ;
tails I remain at Montreal.’ It fell ^ heads ’. I went to the telegraph-
office and wrote the telegram to Dr. Mitchell offering to go to
Philadelphia. I reached in my pockets to pay for the wire. They
were empty. My only change had been the four-mark piece which
I had left as it had fallen on my table. It seemed like an act of Pro-
vidence directing me to lemain in Montreal. I half decided to
follow the cue. Finally I concluded that inasmuch as I had placed
the decision to chance I ought to abide by the turn of the coin, and
returned to my hotel for it and sent the telegram.^

Early in May the announcement had been made of the
retirement, after twenty years’ service, of Alfred Stille from
the senior Chair of Medicine at the University of Pennsyl-
vania, and it was obvious that William Pepper would be
his successor. For Pepper’s Chair of Clinical Medicine
a lively canvass had been in progress and there were two
particularly worthy candidates, both of whom from long
service and in junior positions well deserved advancement.
The following statement of the subsequent events so far as
they concerned Osier has been furnished by Dr. Minis
Hays :

The Medical Committee of the Trustees recommended to the full
Board that a named member of the existing teaching staff should
be elected to fill the vacancy. At a weekly meeting of the Editorial
Staff of the Medical News held shortly afterwards, upon the con-
clusion of the routine business, the members engaged in general
conversation, and the first and uppermost topic naturally was this
recent nomination to the Board of Trustees. There were present
at the meeting Doctors Hays, Bartholow, S. W. Gross, Parvin and
Tyson. Surprise was expressed that the Committee had not gone

^ Remarks before the American Club (Rhodes Scholars) of Oxford,
July 12, 1916 ; unpublished.

Aet. 34 H. C. Wood’s Inquiries 221

further afield and taken a wider view of the available material before
making its recommendation, and Dr. Osier of Montreal was men-
tioned as one eminently qualified to fill with marked ability the
duties of the Chair, but his name, so far as known, had not been
even given consideration in connexion with the filling of the vacancy.

Dr. Osier was then known to the gentlemen present only by
reputation and by his writings. Dr. Tyson, a prominent member
of the University Faculty, while recognizing Dr. Osier’s capacity to
fill the Chair with conspicuous ability, seemed to think that it was
now too late to move in the matter ; but in reply it was strongly
urged upon him by those present that as the election had not been
consummated the situation was not irretiievable. The other
members of the staff strenuously concurred in the views expressed,
and recognizing their force Dr. Tyson finally said that he would
immediately take up the matter with his colleague Dr. Horatio
C. Wood, who was then still in town — most of the members of the
Medical Faculty being away on their summer holiday. The sugges-
tion appealed very strongly to Dr. Wood, and with his characteristic
energy he at once journeyed to Montreal to learn at first hand
more concerning Dr. Osier’s attainments and qualifications for the
position.

All who were familiar with Osier’s consulting-room and
study in Baltimore, and with his library in Oxford, will
recall certain familiar pictures. There was a large photo-
graph, of course, of Bovell, another of Johnson, and another
of Howard. Over the mantel was the panel of his three
heroes : Linacre, Sydenham, and Harvey, the great trium-
virate of British Medicine. Another portrait gave the fine
profile of Newman, whom he admired as greatly for his
personal characteristics as Johnson did for his religious
views ; and still another was a large photograph of H. C.
Wood wearing a picturesque fur cap such as a distinguished
earlier fellow townsman of his, Benjamin Franklin, was wont
to wear.

Though they became great friends, he and Wood, as the
foregoing statement indicates, were not acquainted at this
time, and as the story is told in Montreal : some time in
the summer of 1884 H. C. Wood suddenly appeared,
unannounced, to make inquiries regarding the local feeling
about Osier. He went first of all, curiously enough, to the
French hospitals, and found that among the French physi-
cians every one spoke of him in the highest terms ; he then

2 22 The Philadelphia Call June 1884

yisited the Montreal General, where he encountered such
a degree of enthusiasm for Osier on the part of the young
members of the house-staff that he became himself a
thorough convert, and returned home without interviewing
any of Osier’s colleagues on the Faculty.’ So it came
about that on June 17th a coin was flipped at 14c Terch
Strasse, Leipzig, which fell ^ heads ’. To this episode
Osier, with some stretching of the facts, referred at the
time of his departure for England fifteen years later, as
follows :

I would like to tell you how I came to this country. The men
responsible for my arrival were Samuel W. Gross and Minis Hays, of
Philadelphia, who concocted the scheme in the Medical News
office and got James Tyson to write a letter asking if I would be
a candidate for the professorship of Clinical Medicine in the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania. That letter reached me at Leipzig, having
been forwarded to me from Montreal by my friend Shepherd.
I had played so many pranks on my friends there that when the
letter came I felt sure it was all a joke, so little did I think that
I was one to be asked to succeed Dr. Pepper. It was several weeks
before I ventured to answer that letter, fearing that Dr. Shepherd
had perhaps surreptitiously taken a sheet of University of Pennsyl-
vania note-paper on purpose to make the joke more certain. Dr.
Mitchell cabled me to meet him in London, as he and his good wife
were commissioned to ‘ look me over particularly with reference
to personal habits. Dr. Mitchell said there was only one way in
which the breeding of a man suitable for such a position, in such
a city as Philadelphia, could be tested : give him cherry-pie and
see how he disposed of the stones. I had read of the trick
before, and disposed of them genteelly in my spoon — and got
the Chair.^

It became necessary for Osier to engage again in the
procedure of soliciting testimonials to forward to the
University trustees in Philadelphia. It was done in a less
distasteful manner than in his enforced campaign in 1878
for the appointment to the Montreal General — merely by
asking some of his London friends, Bastian, Gowers, and
Burden Sanderson, to send some word concerning him to
Dr. Mitchell if they felt so inclined. These letters were of
such an unqualified nature as to leave no doubt in any

^ ^ L’Envoi ’ : Response at farewell dinner, May 2, 1905 Medical News,
1905, Ixixvi. 854-60.

Aet. 34 If We can get Him 223

one’s mind as to Osier’s desirability on every possible score.
Mitchell meanwhile had gone to Paris, whence he wrote
a succession of letters to Tyson urging him to move, for
^ unless we are pretty active we shall be saddled with
another to Joseph Leidy, adding that, ‘Osier is socially
a man for the Biological Club if by any good luck we can
get him ’ ; and to others of the Faculty :

To James C, Wilson from S. Weir Mitchell, Paris, 17th Quly].

I send more letters about Osier. He was to write me after hearing
from Howard and as he has not done so I wrote him to-day about it,
but the testimonials still coming must mean that he, Osier, has
decided. Pepper has written me at length, and thinks that Bruen
has great strength in the Board ; I put him last for fitness and am
in no doubt that Osier is in all ways the best man. He has every
social need ; his age is 35. He has won distinction as an investigator
and writer, and will therefore add to our illustriousness, and as to
competence as a teacher if anyone can be believed he must be a really
unusual instructor. I wish you would write to Howard about him.
I would vote for Osier with far less doubt in my mind than one
usually has and with less than I should have as to any other candidate.
Guiteras would be my second choice and Starr my third. If possible
I think that the Provost and individual trustees, and I would say the
faculty, ought to see the testimonials of Osier, and so much of my
letters as concern him, and as you might think well to have copied.
But these are purely suggestions. If you think well of it, Tyson
would put together all there is in Osier’s favour and see that all
concerned saw it. . . ,

What Osier wrote to Palmer Howard is not apparent, but
a fragment has been preserved of a letter which Howard
wrote so soon as rumours had reached his ears and a meeting
of the Faculty could be called, and which offers too late
some counter-proposals :

From Palmer Howard to W, 0 . The Saint Louis Hotel, Quebec,

[no date].

... I avail myself of the first opportunity to communicate to
you. In the first place, the Faculty is not willing at once to relieve
you of the Professorship of Physiology, and to m^e an appointment
to that chair of a Professor. It thinks it wiser to allow some person
probably Dr. Mills to lecture in the coming session on that subject
for you with the view of finding out his adaptation to and fitness
for the work of teaching. Altho’ they do not question his ability
they have some fears of his personal fitness in other respects. Under

224 The Philadelphia Call Aug. 1884

this feeling and with these views the following resolution has passed
unanimously at a large meeting of the Fac. : Moved by Dr. Farnell,
seconded by Dr. Roddick, that this Faculty authorizes the Dean to
communicate to Prof. Osier as follows : ' That this Faculty under-
takes to make arrangements for the establishment of a chair of
Pathology and Comparative Pathology at as early a date as possible.
That the sum of sixteen hundred dollars be hereby voted to Dr.
Osier for this year.’

Now as to the other part of it I don’t know how to speak my own
sentiments and those of the entire Fac. ; the thought of losing you
stuns us, and we feel anxious to do all that we can as sensible men
to keep you amongst us, not only on account of your abilities as a
, teacher, your industry and enthusiasm as a worker, your personal
qualities as a gentleman, a colleague and a friend ; not only on
account of the work you have already done in and for the school,
but also because of the capabilities we recognize in you for future
useful work, both in original investigation which shall add reputation
to McGill and in systematic teaching of any of the branches of
Medical Science you may care to cultivate ; and finally because we
have for years felt that vitalizing influence upon us individually
exercised by personal contact with you — analogous to that produced
by a potent ferment.

At the same time we know nothing of the inducements that may
have been held out from other quarters, but hasten to assure you
that the above expresses the spirit of our intentions. In any case
don’t finally decide to go elsewhere before you have either seen or
communicated with us.

To H, V, Ogden from W, 0 . 25 Russell Sq., London,

[Aug. 1, 1884].

... I have been in England about three weeks and am enjoying
London again. It is the world. How I should like to live here •
Perhaps you have heard that by Oct. ist I may have changed my
allegiance and joined you as a citizen of the Gt. Republic. I have
been asked by some of my Philadelphia friends to be a candidate
for the chair of clinical medicine, vacant by the transference of
Pepper to the chair of medicine. I have consented and from what
Pepper writes me I think they mean to elect me — at any rate I have
the strong professional backing of the electionary board. The salary
is about what I get at McGill and of course the temptations are the
larger centre and the prospects of consulting work. I am grieved
at the thought of leaving McGill and Dr. Howard, but they will
get along quite well without me — any one man is never essen-
tial. ... I leave on the 7th and take out with me an aunt — a
young girl of 84. I wish you could run down to Montreal for the
meeting. . . ,

Aet. 35

The Decision made

225

He must have seen all his old friends in London, have
visited Schafer at Elstree, and have gone to Cornwall to see
the family relations there ; and when he sailed on the 7th
he brought out with him ‘ the young girl of 84 ’ — Mary Anne
Piclcton, his mother’s sister, who was henceforth to share
the family home in Toronto. On the fly-leaf of John Henry
Newman’s ‘ Verses on Various Occasions ’, a volume still
in his library. Osier had written in a later hand :

This copy was given to my Aunt, Miss Pickton, of Edgbaston,
Birmingham, by Cardinal Newman, with his photograph. She gave
it to mein 1884, the year I brought her out to Canada. She and
the Cardinal were exactly the same age. The additional verse to
The Pillar of the Cloud fi. e. Lead, Kindly Lighti at p. itz is in her
handwriting.

It is probable that during the voyage he found time to
write the ‘ Notes of a Visit to European Medical Centres ’,
which was published shortly after. ^ It is a resume of his
impressions, and concludes with this significant paragraph
which shows the direction in which his thoughts were leading
him — away from the pathological institute and from com-
parative pathology to the ideal clinic which became his
goal:

The custom of placing one or tv 70 men in charge of a large hospital
seems odd to us and has both advantages and disadvantages* Thus,
Dr. Guttmann is responsible to the city authorities for the care of
about 350 patients at the Moabit institution and is, of course,
allowed a staff of assistants on whom necessarily a large proportion
of the work falls, and in some cases the treatment is entirely in their
hands. At the city hospitals the rotation of assistants is much more
rapid than at the University clinics, where they gladly remain for
years at small salaries for the sake of the opportunity of making
reputations as clinical workers. At the Charite the wards of Frerichs,
Leyden and Westphal are clinical laboratories utilized for the
scientific study and treatment of disease, and the assistants under
the direction of the Professor carry on investigations and aid in
the instruction. The advanced position of German medicine and the
reputation of the schools as teaching centres are largely fruits of
this system.

It was while he was at sea that the Editorial Board of the
Medical News saw fit to make an announcement in their

^ Editorial. Archves of Medtane, N Y , 1884, xii. 170-84
Q

2923 I

Aet.3s The Mid-point of Life 227

foreign university ’ ; and due acknowledgement made of his
services as professor and of the ‘ admirable and efficient
manner in which during the past seven years he has per-
formed the important duties of Registrar Finally, on the
eve of his departure, a large complimentary dinner, at which
Palmer Howard presided, was given at the Windsor Hotel.
The students themselves, not to be outdone, presented him
with a handsome hunting-case watch, suitably inscribed,
and they will be glad to know it was the watch he always
wore.

So McGill lost what Howard called its ‘ potent ferment ’ ;
and thus closed Osier’s Canadian period. He was thirty-five
years of age, at the mid-point of his life, as it proved, though
his expectancy at that time, in view of his ancestry, was
for a longer tenure than is vouchsafed most men. Such
a transplantation from one university to another of a
clinician at the height of his career, though common enough
in Europe, was unusual in America, and it caused a great
deal of comment — favourable, be it said — on all sides. Still,
even in America, there was ample precedent, as in the case
of Nathan Smith, Dunglison, Gibson, Elisha Bartlett,
Bartholow, Flint, Gross, and more besides. Nevertheless
there was something different about Osier’s call, for it
represented the choice of a young man, known more for his
scientific papers and his interest in research than for any
proved clinical ability. Time has shown that such a prepara-
tion is often the best, though the appointment of laboratory-
trained men to clinical positions often raises an outcry.

Unwilling to let go entirely, and trusting perhaps that the
experiment might not succeed, the McGill Faculty at their
meeting on September 3rd had voted him a six-months
leave of absence, and his resignation was not officially
accepted until October nth, when final resolutions of
regret were passed. Their hopes of his return were vain ;
and though in years to come he was often urged to do so,
it was not to be. But he was never forgetful of what he
owed to J ohnson and Bovell and Howard ; to the microscope
and the pathological laboratory ; to the Montreal General
and to his Canadian friends.

What particularly lured him is difficult now to tell. It

Q2

228

An Abandoned Pluralist

Oct 1884

may even have been difficult for him to tell. For a person
capable of such strong local attachments there is something
contradictory about it. A great career was assured in
Montreal, whereas Philadelphia was an uncertainty in a land
more foreign to him than England. The singularity of the
call may have influenced him; and an ancestral impulse
which bade him accept. He possibly realized that his bent
lay in the study of disease as it was seen at the bedside rather
than in the laboratory. As W. T. Councilman has said : ^

‘ He could easily have become a great scientist, but he chose
the path which led to the formation of the great clinician
which he became ; a worthy associate of the great men who
have made English medicine famous.’

During the short span of years since his McGill appoint-
ment he had stirred into activity the slumbering Medico-
Chirurgical Society ; he had founded and supported
a students’ medical club ; he had brought the Veterinary
School into relation with the University ; he had introduced
the modern methods of teaching physiology ; had edited
the first clinical and pathological reports of a Canadian
hospital ; had recorded nearly a thousand autopsies and
made innumerable museum preparations of the most
important specimens ; he had written countless papers,
many of them ephemeral it is true, but most of them on
topics of live interest for the time, and a few of them epoch-
mating ; he had worked at biology and pathology both
human and comparative, as well as at the bedside ; he had
shown courage in taking the small-pox wards, charity in his
dealings with his fellow physicians in and out of his own
school, generosity, to his students, fldelity to his tasks ; and
his many uncommon qualities had earned him popularity
unsought and of a most unusual degree.

Years later, in an address ® given at McGill, while admitting
that ‘ the dust of passing time had blurred the details, even
in part the general outlines, of the picture ’, Osier spoke of
this formative period of his medical career as one ‘ during
which he had become a pluralist of the most abandoned

^ The Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, July 1919, xxx 197

^ ‘ After Twenty-fiye Years ’ Montreal Medical Journal, 1899,

823

XXVIU.

Aet. 35 His Local Attachments 229

sort ’5 and concluded his interesting and amusing recollec-
tions by saying :

After ten years of hard work I left this city a rich man, not in this
world’s goods, for such I have the misfortune — or the good fortune —
lightly to esteem ; but rich in the goods which neither rust nor
moth have been able to corrupt, in treasures of friendship and
good-fellowship, and in those treasures of widened experience and
a fuller knowledge of men and manners which contact with the
bright minds in the profession ensures. My heart, or a good bit of
it at least, has stayed with those who bestowed on me these treasures.
Many a day I have felt it turn towards this city to the dear friends
I left there, my college companions, my teachers, my old chums,
the men with whom I lived in closest intimacy, and in parting from
whom I felt the chordae tendineae grow tense.

PART II

THE UNITED STATES, 1884-1905

There are men and classes of men that stand
above the common herd the soldier, the sailor
and the shepherd not infrequently , the artist
rarely ; rarelier still, the clergyman ; the physi-
cian almost as a rule He is the flower (such
as it is) of our civihzation , and when that
stage of man is done with, and only remembered
to be marvelled at in history, he will be thought
to have shared as little as any m the defects
of the period, and most notably exhibited the
virtues of the race Generosity he hats, such as is
possible to those who practise an art, never to
those who drive a trade , discretion, tested by
a hundred secrets , tact, tried in a thousand
embarrassments ; and what are more important,
Heraclean cheerfulness and courage So it is
that he brings air and cheer into the sickroom,
and often enough, though not so often as he
wishes, bnngs healing

Dedication to * Underwoods h
R. L S

CHAPTER XI

1884-5

FIRST YEARS IN PHILADELPHIA

Osler’s Philadelphia period began with his arrival on
Saturday afternoon, October lith, 1884, at a family
hostelry which then and since has enjoyed the bookish
appellation of the Aldine Hotel. The name, for obvious
reasons, had been given by Mr. Lippincott the publisher,
who had purchased what was formerly a residence and trans-
formed it into a lodging-house in 1876 for visitors to the
Centennial Exposition. The place had seen better days,
days indeed of society and fashion when in the ’50’s it
had been the suburban home of the son of Benjamin Rush ;
and though residential Philadelphia has long tended to
confine itself within much the same boundaries, 20th and
Chestnut Streets were in the ’8o’s far from being suburban.
It was one of those off-years when even October brings
a spell of sultry weather, which must have been an unhappy
contrast to the cool Province of Quebec for a lonesome man
searching the heart of Philadelphia for a place to reside.
In his account-book of the period he has laconically written
opposite Tuesday, October 21st: ‘Came to 131 S. 15th
Street ’, and there follows a list of what appear to have been
the dinner engagements to which custom subjected the
new-comer ; ‘ Oct. 28, Sinkler ; 30, Musser ; 31, Seiler ;
Nov. 2, Sun., Gross at 2 p.m. ; 10, Brinton ; 14, Pepper
dinner at 7 p.m. ; 17, Brinton ditto ; 23, Weir Mitchell
7 p.m. ; 25, Dinner at Pepper’s ; 26, Faculty ; 27, Thanks-
giving Dr. Tyson ; 28, Wood ; 29, Mrs. Longstreth.’
Here the entries end.

No. 13 1 South 15th Street where he was to live alone for
three years was a narrow, fifteen-foot, three-story brick
house of the mongrel type of Philadelphia domestic archi-
tecture of about 1830, with basement windows on a level
with the pavement, a high flight of steps to the front door,
and an area-way beneath. It was one of a row of similar
houses crowded in the block south of Chestnut Street where

234 University of Pennsylvania Oct. 1884

the Union League Club now stands. Osier occupied the
two ground-floor rooms ; an office in front lined with
bookshelves, and a waiting-room behind similarly lined.
Among them some one remembers Jowett’s ‘ Plato ’ in
gaudy binding, and also that there were many medals and
ribbons, relics of his former athletic prowess, that decorated
the mantel. It was a wee establishment — probably kept
none too tidy by its good-natured owner, Otto Hansen,
a caterer, who lived upstairs, got his tenant’s breakfast for
him and otherwise tended to his simple wants. One of
these was that books and papers should be left where
deposited, whether on table, chairs, or floor. This must
have been easy for Otto.

Though his advent had been much heralded, little was
known about him, as is evident from a story told of old
Dr. D. H. Agnew, a devout person of Scotch-Irish ancestry,
who wrote and asked if Dr. and Mrs. Osier would not share
his pew in the Second Presbyterian Church the following
Sunday. When Osier was ushered in unaccompanied,
Agnew whispered regrets that he was alone, whereupon
Osier’s mischievous half got the better of him. He merely
raised his eyebrows and finger, which was interpreted by
Agnew — and circulated — that the new-comer’s wife was
‘ expecting ’.

So far as the students were concerned, there can be no
doubt that their first impression was one of disappointment.
No polished declamations with glowing word-pictures of
disease, such as they had listened to from Stifle and Pepper,
and for which indeed the Philadelphia school was famed,
came from this swarthy person with drooping moustache
and informal ways, who instead of arriving in his carriage,
jumped off from a street-car, carrying a small black satchel
containing his lunch, and with a bundle of books and papers
under his arm ; who was apt to pop in by the back door
instead of by the main entrance ; who wore, it is recalled,
a frock-coat, top hat, a flowing red necktie, low shoes, and
heavy worsted socks which gave him a foreign look ; who,
far from having the eloquence of his predecessor, was
distinctly halting in speech ; who always insisted on having
actual examples of the disease to illustrate his weekly

Aet. 35

Osier's Advent

235

discourse on Fridays at eleven, and, as likely as not, sat on
the edge of the table swinging his feet and twisting his ear
instead of behaving like an orator — this at least was not the
professor they had expected.

It is said of Pepper that, with great dignity but conveying
the impression of having no time to spare, he would enter
the classroom while taking off gloves and coat, and immedi-
ately begin a brilliant discourse on some topic, not always
related to his prescribed subject. Osier, on the other hand,
could be dignified enough and serious, but playfulness and
gaiety were always ready to break through the mask. More-
over, anything suggesting the poseur was foreign to his
make-up, and there was no concealment of the fact that he
felt the need of elaborate preparations for his more formal
student exercises.

But it was a horse of another colour when the students
came in contact with Osier in the wards, for the bedside
instruction such as he was accustomed to, was an undeveloped
feature in the Philadelphia school. He shared with Pepper
in the University Hospital the two large medical wards
(B and D they still remain), but Pepper, though the head
of the medical department and engaged in a large private
practice, was Provost of the University as well, actively at
work adding to its resources. Hence he rarely appeared
except to give his accustomed lectures, so that Osier had
these wards almost to himself ; and in them, with an
increasingly enthusiastic group of students about him, he
was to be found the larger part of each morning during this
first year and until greater opportunities took him elsewhere
for his main bedside visits.

Among the young clinical men at this time, original study
or research of any kind was almost unknown, and even had
any sign of an investigative spirit been present there were
no facilities for its development. For this. Osier’s enthusi-
asm soon made an opening ; almost within a month of his
arrival he had rigged up a small clinical laboratory under
a part of the hospital amphitheatre, and there, amid sur-
roundings as unpromising as the students’ cloak-room at
McGill, he is said to have soon ^ produced an atmosphere so
encouraging and helpful that young fellows trooped to his

236 University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1884

side This was a new experience to the senior students, who
had previously been fed largely on graceful generalizations
concerning disease, delivered from a platform. As one of
them has said, it was like ^ a breath of fresh air let into
a stifling room and disappointment soon gave way to
devotion. Of this time Howard A. Kelly has written : ^

I was living in Philadelphia up in the big mill district of Ken-
sington, culling a surgical out of a large general practice, and at
the same time keeping in close touch with things at the University
of Pennsylvania, for eight years my college, when it became manifest
that some fresh and stirring blood had entered the college life. The
university, with so many eminent men camping on her very doorstep
in Philadelphia, and with that tendency to nepotism — a form of
paternal pride seen in all successful institutions — had, as we younger
men thought, driven John Guiteras of brilliant promise in general
medicine, away from her doors to protect Pepper from rivalry, and
now, not without great hesitation as we understood, she had actually
broken her shackles, thrown traditions to the winds and pulled
William Osier down from McGill. Fresh invigorating currents of
life and new activities in our stereotyped medical teachings began
at once to manifest themselves, and every sturdy expectant youngster
in short order lined himself up as a satellite to the new star. Osier
breezes were felt everywhere in the old conservative medical .centre,
and yet it was not without some difficulties that he securely estab-
lished himself.

Medical education at the time in the States was under-
going radical changes. After the reforms at Harvard a few
years before under the firm hand of President Eliot, the
University of Pennsylvania was the next to follow in making
a three-year medical course obligatory ; and the senior
students of 1884 had been the first of whom an entrance
examination had been required. Some of the old faculty
members, as was natural, had opposed these reforms which
the younger generation, represented particularly by Wood
and Tyson, warmly upheld ; but the result was that there
had been a painful controversy in the Faculty. Before
Pepper’s appointment as Provost in 1881 the medical
school had been larger than the academic department ; but
with the stiffening of the admission requirements its num-
bers, as was inevitable, fell off, and this was a source of

^ ^ Osier as I knew him in Philadelphia and in the Hopkins.’ Johns Hopkins
Hospital Bulletin, July 1919, xxx. 215.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Aet. 35

237

anxiety to the younger medical teachers who had favoured
the change and who feared there would be a lack of financial
support, particularly for the development of laboratories.
All of the teachers were active in practice, with the excep-
tion of Joseph Leidy, an eminent naturalist, who was
Professor of Anatomy. Harrison Allen lectured on physio-
logy but practised laryngology for a living ; Tyson, who was
Professor of Physiology, taught many other things and was
likewise active in practice, which was also true of H. C.
Wood, Agnew, Ashurst, Goodell, and the others. A recent
graduate of the period, who, though working in the phar-
macological laboratory, came under Osier’s influence, has
since written ^ :

The remarkable part of Osier’s entrance was that while the report
of his election raised waves of regret and indignation, his actual
plunge in the pond at once had the effect of making its surface
placid, and this without there being any manifest effort on his part
to ingratiate himself with any one or all of the factions. He entered
so gracefully and ably, and so naturally, that he seemed almost at
once to be one of us, young and old. He was gracious to his elders,
cordial to his contemporaries, encouraging to his juniors, and jovial
almost to the point of frivolity with all , but the dominant factor
that made his way successful with all hands was, to use a student
phrase, ‘ he was up ’ — that is, he knew his subject and how to teach
what he knew.

Osier’s disinclination for a general practice, for which
a university position was coveted as a portal of entry, and
his determination to limit himself largely to consultations,
was mystifying to his medical colleagues, most of whom were
accustomed to hold afternoon office hours and to engage
actively in house-to-house practice. His afternoons, on the
contrary, usually found him at ‘ Blockley ’, where, as will
be learned, after his morning at the University Hospital
and some bread-and-milk picked up in the ward, he would
betake himself with a group of students to spend the after-
noon making post-mortem examinations instead of sitting
in his office awaiting patients. Dr. J. C. Wilson years later,
in referring to Osier’s advent, said : ‘ First, then, we at
once sought to make a practitioner of him. But of that he

^ H. A Hare : ‘ William Osier as a Teacher and Clinician.’ Therapeutic
Gazette, Detroit, Mar. 1920. ^

238 University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1884

would have none. Teacher, clinician, consultant, yes,
gladly ; but practitioner — no ! And that with emphasis.’ ^

Osier’s newly and rapidly acquired friends were by no
means limited to those of his own school, and the households
he came particularly to frequent were those of S. W. Gross,
Minis Hays, James Wilson, and Weir Mitchell. He testified
to this in a long letter written many years later to the Jeffer-
son medical students, just before the war, regretting that he
could not pay them a promised visit :

... I owe much to the men of this school — let me tell you in
what way. The winter of 1869-70 I had a bedroom above the
office of my preceptor, Dr. James Bovell, of whose library I had the
‘ run In the long winter evenings, instead of reading my text-
books, Gray and Fownes and Kirkes, I spent hours browsing among
folios and quartos, and the promiscuous literature with which his
library was stocked. I date my mental downfall from that winter,
upon which, however, I look back with unmixed delight. I became
acquainted then with three old — Eberle, Dunglison and

Samuel D. Gross. The name of the first I had already heard in my
physiology lectures in connection with the discovery of cyanide of
potassium in the saliva, but in his ‘ Treatise of the Materia Medica
and in his ‘ Treatise on the Practice of Medicine ’ (in the yellow-
brown calfskin that characterized Philadelphia medical books of the
period) I found all sorts of useless information in therapeutics so
dear to the heart of a second-year medical student. Eberle was
soon forgotten as the years passed by, but it was far otherwise with
Robley Dunglison, a warm friend to generations of American medical
students. Thomas Jefferson did a good work when he imported
him from London, as Dunglison had all the wisdom of his day and
generation combined with a colossal industry. He brought great
and well deserved reputation to Jefferson College. After all, there
is no such literature as a Dictionary, and the twenty-three editions
through which Dunglison passed is a splendid testimony to its
usefulness. It was one of my stand-bys, and I still have an affection
for the old editions of it, which did such good service. (And by the
way, if any of you among your grandfathers’ old books find the ist
edition, published in 1833, send it to me, please). But the book of
Dunglison full of real joy to the student was the ^ Physiology ’, not
so much knowledge : that was all concentrated in Kirkes, but there
were so many nice trimmings in the shape of good stories. . . .

In this vein he went on to say that he had really been

^ Remarks at the farewell dinner to Dr. Osier, May 2, 1905 Privately
printed.

Aet.3S Early Friendships 239

brought to Philadelphia through the good offices of Jefferson
men. The senior Gross, who had died only the preceding
May, had been the outstanding figure of his generation in
American surgery ; and during his Philadelphia period, from
the time he succeeded T. D. Mutter in 1856 until his death,
his household was noted for its hospitality. Rarely did
any waif visiting the clinics in Philadelphia fail to partake
of his abundant table. In this tradition his son Samuel W.
Gross had been brought up, and it was what his daughter-
in-law too had come to regard as merely the customary
cordiality among doctors. It was natural enough, there-
fore, that this couple should have called promptly on the
new-comer on a Saturday evening in his forlorn rooms on
South 15 th Street, where they found a most homesick
person pestered by mosquitoes, sweltering in the heat of
a breathless October evening ; and the outcome was that
he took his Sunday dinner with them the following day.

This was the beginning of a great friendship, and nearly
every Sunday found Osier at the Gross’s for dinner, where
he often brought with him a friend or two who might
be visiting Philadelphia ; among them later on. Palmer
Howard, Ross, and Shepherd. One of the few laments
about his new environment was the want of afternoon tea
for one accustomed to it, and for whom lunch was a trifling
matter to be carried in the pocket or picked up haphazard
in a hospital ward. But a cup of tea could be assured
at the Gross’s, where too, after the doctor’s office hours,
young people were apt to be found, and where the door
would be opened at the first touch of the bell by old
Morris, the smiling coloured butler, known to so many
of Osier’s friends in the Baltimore years to come, who
was able to make an afternoon visitor doubly welcome.
Moreover, 1112 Walnut Street was conveniently near the
Medical News office, and not far from the College of
Physicians Library, where he usually buried himself from
five to six in the afternoon.

Osier’s irrepressible tendency to practical jokes was by no
means uprooted in consequence of his transplantation to
Philadelphia, and it cropped out frequently, particularly as
an outgrowth of the ^ E. Y. D.’ tradition. Sir James Barrie,

240 University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1884

in his Rectorial Address delivered at St. Andrews in 1922,
remarked that his puppets seem more real to him than
himself, and that he could get on swimmingl7 if he could
only make one of them deliver the address :

It is M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M’Con-
nachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost
doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself : the writing
half. We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is
dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half . . . who prefers
to fly around on one wing. I should not mind him doing that but
he drags me with him.

Egerton Y. Davis was Osler^s M’Connachie' — his fanciful
half, who first and last got him into a good deal of trouble.
As may be recalled, he first appeared on the scene with the
perpetration of a joke at the expense of one of Osier’s
Montreal friends. At about this time Theophilus Parvin,
one of the collaborators on the anonymous Board editing
the Medical Netos^ an obstetrician of considerable pomposity
and a tempting mark for M’Connachies, wrote an editorial
on an obscure topic relating to his special field of work.
This was too much for Osier’s mischievous half, and a letter
postmarked Montreal and signed ^ Egerton Y. Davis,
Ex-U.S. Army ’ was soon received by Parvin, commenting
favourably on his editorial and citing in full a fictitious case
of the sort Parvin had seen fit to discuss. Certain documents
relating to a ^ MS. of Egerton Yorrick Davis, M.D., late
U.S. Army, Caughnawauga, P. Q.’ may be found in the
Osier library, and in a note prefatory to them occurs the
following somewhat mystifying account of how Osier became
entangled with this person :

I never could understand about Egerton Yorrick Davis. He is
represented to have practised at Caughnawauga nearly opposite
Montreal, where his collections were stored in the Guildhall. Some
have said that he was a drunken old reprobate, but the only occasion
on which I met him, he seemed a peaceable enough old rascal. One
thing is certain, he was drowned in the Lachine Rapids in 1884, ^^d
the body was never recovered. He had a varied life — in the U.S.
Army ; in the North West ; among the Indians ; as a general
practitioner in the north of London. I knew his son well — a nice
mild-mannered fellow, devoted to his father.

These notes of customs among the Indian Tribes of the Great

The E. Y. D. Tradition

Aet. 35

241

Slave Lake were sent to Dr. Molson just after he had taken over
the Montreal Medical Journal with Dr, Ross. One day I was in the
job-room of the Gazette ofRce where the Journal was printed, and
Connolly said • ‘ Oh, there is an awful article for the Journal this
month — Peter is in despair about it (P. was the compositor) and
says Dr. Ross will never print it.’ I went over and found these
sheets all set up [cf. p. 181]. I told Connolly that Davis had not
a very good reputation and to hold the printing until Dr. Ross saw
the article. Of course he saw at once it was not fit to print.

I heard nothing more of Davis until I went to Philadelphia.
I was on the staff of the Medical News, and Parvin in 1884 and 1885
was very interested in the action of the peiinaeal muscles. One day
I met Minis Hays the Editor, who said : ^ By the way, do you know
Egerton Y. Davis who lives somewhere near Montreal ? Parvin is
delighted as he has sent the report of a case just such as he thought
possible.’ I said : ‘ Hays, for Heaven’s sake ! Don’t print anything
from that man Davis : I know he is not a reputable character. Ross
and Roddick know him well.’ ‘ Too late now,’ Hays said, the
journal is printed off.’ So the letter appeared. The case has gone
into literature and is often quoted. Minis Hays was disgusted, as
Ross insisted that Davis was a joke, and he and Roddick hinted that
I of all people was the one who knew anything about him. Some
went so far as to say that I was Davis, and the rumour got about in
Philadelphia. I never but once met the man. Afterwards I often
used his name when I did not wish to be known. I would sign my
name in the Hotel Registers as E. Y. Davis, Caughnawauga ’. Once
at Atlantic City after I had had bronchopneumonia I registered
under that name immediately after Mrs. Osier and Revere. I had
been there a week when a man came up and said : ^ Are you Dr. Osier ?
I have been looking for you for a week : your secretary said you were
away and not to be got at. My son is ill here and I wished you to
see him.’ He had said to Cadwallader Biddle, * Who is that fellow
Davis all the time with Mrs. Osier? ’ — and was furious when he
found that I had registered under that name. They tell in Montreal
many jokes about Davis, and father many of them on me. I am
always sorry that I did not see more of him, and that I never visited
his collections at the Guildhall, Caughnawauga,

William Osler.^

Osier could thoroughly enjoy a practical joke, even when
he himself was the victim, and his own pranks which were
merely an expression of his lively sense of fun were what

^ On the margin is written ; ‘ For an excellent variation of this story,
containing all the essentials but the truth, see that of “ The Relation of
Medical Literature to Professional Esteem ” by Dr Bayard Holmes W. O.’
[Editorials in Lancet-Climc, Cincinnati, Aug. y-Nov. 28, 1915.]

2923 I

R

242 University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1884

served to make him such a good companion. But it was not
often that his M’Connachie got the better of him ; most
of the work of the News office was serious enough and it was
no small task for the four anonymous editors, who met
every Wednesday noon in Hays’s office at 1004 Walnut
Street, to run a weekly journal of twenty-eight quarto pages
with its four or five editorials in each number. It was here
that Osier was of greatest help to the Board, and he
appeared to have an inexhaustible supply of material on
hand which he could easily put into shape for publication
in an emergency.

As has been seen, he was a rapid, methodical reader with
an exceptionally retentive memory, but in addition he had
formed the habit of jotting down the gist of what he had
read so that it could be drawn on when needed, and more-
over he would often augment the notes with some reflections
of his own. It was due to this habit of writing as he read
that he finally acquired the charm of style which character-
ized his later essays, and which had already begun to show
itself. It was due also to this habit that so many brief notes
and postcards of comment and commendation were promptly
sent off to rejoice the hearts particularly of young writers
whose fledgling articles he happened to have read. Owing
to his editorial writing on new and important subjects, his
ideas came to be so well formulated and his information
so exact in many directions, that when he composed his
medical masterpiece five years later in Baltimore it was
done throughout with such a sureness of touch and with
his facts expressed in such readable form that it immediately
superseded all other text-books of general medicine and still
continues to hold the field.

During this first year in Philadelphia he usually dined
alone at the old Colonnade Hotel, diagonally across the
street from his rooms, always it is said with books and
manuscript on the table, and he was usually to be seen
reading and making notes during the course of the meal.
But later on he was accustomed to dine at the Rittenhouse
or the University Club, and, though essentially sociable,
he had the great gift of appearing to be longer in company
than he really was ; of being able to fraternize briefly and

Aet. 35 The Biological Club 243

to withdraw without his withdrawal being pointed ; and
if missed and sought for he was certain to be found in the
club library where, as is recalled, ‘ Osier usually cut the
magazines others rarely read, like the Revue ies Deux Monies
and the Nineteenth Century. ''

From the note previously quoted, it is evident that he did
not regard himself as what is called a club man, in spite of
the fact that he was much sought after by the most exclu-
sive of them. Certainly in the sense that he much preferred
his own table, library, and fireside, when he came to have
a real home, to anything a club could offer, he was not
‘ clubbable However, during his bachelor years he perforce
was a frequenter of clubs, and though distinctly companion-
able he was not one to sit about, to sip and gossip. But with
dining clubs it was different, for at those he would let
himself go and was usually the bright spot of the party —
vivacious, friendly, amusing, and with the gift of stimulating
others to their conversational best.

There were three dining clubs in Philadelphia to which
he belonged — the Medical Club or ‘ Club of 19 ’, the
Biological Club, and the Mahogany Tree Club. The ‘ Club
of 19 ’ consisted of a group of intimates who held the reins
in the University of Pennsylvania School, and who at this
time met fortnightly in rotation at one another’s houses,
where ‘ a club ’, as was said, was given. This amounted at
first to a simple repast of coffee and biscuit, but such plain
living and high thinking has given way in time, as it not
infrequently does with such gatherings, to a more formal
and largely gastronomic function. The Peppers, George
and William, H. C. Wood, Tyson, Harrison Allen, H. B.
Hare, S. W. Gross, Herbert and William F. Norris, William
Goodell, Wharton Sinkler and others had all been or still
were members.

As Weir Mitchell had written to Leidy on August 3rd,
Osier was socially ‘ a man for the Biological Club ’ if they
could get him. This they did, and the meetings of this
group of scientists always stood out among the pleasantest
recollections of his Philadelphia period. This Club, which
had been in existence since 1856, was patterned somewhat
on the lines of Huxley’s X Club which had begun to hold

244 University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1884

meetings two years before, though it does not appear that
the Philadelphia copy of its London prototype ever had
excursions or accepted the formula of X’% + TVh\ It
met more frequently, however, and dined on the second and
fourth Friday of each month, there being two guests
permitted on each occasion.

As was said by Huxley of the X Club, these friends for-
gathered with no special object beyond the desire to hold
together a group of men with strong personal sympathies
and to prevent their drifting apart under the pressure of
busy lives ; and, as he also said, they probably could have
managed among them ‘ to contribute most of the articles
to a scientific encyclopaedia As was true also of the
X Club, no effort was made to perpetuate it, and as the
X Club died in 1892 with its most devoted supporter,
T. A. Hirst the mathematician, so the Biological Club did
not survive Joseph Leidy’s death in April 1891. Joseph
Leidy, at this time sixty-one years of age and at the height
of his intellectual powers, was Osier’s chief delight at these
meetings. For Leidy’s accomplishments and particularly
for his skill with a pencil he had unbounded admiration,
and though they were of different generations there was
great similarity between the manner of upbringing and the
early interests shown by these two men, both of them
having begun their life’s work with a study of the parasitic
entozoans. Leidy’s magnificent monograph on Rhizopods,
illustrated by his own exquisite drawings, had been published
by the Government shortly before this time.^ A copy is
in Osier’s library, its association value enhanced by the
insertion of one of Leidy’s incomparable microscopic draw-
ings, secured (as the following letter makes clear) years later,
at a time when books were his chief solace.

To Joseph Leidy Jr. from W. 0 . Oxford, i6/vi/i5.

Dear Leidy, Oh ! I would take the risk. Send those Notes over.
I want to have them bound with the ‘ Flora and Fauna The
steamers are running. regularly and we get about four mails a week
from America. Could you not steal me one of the original sketches
of the rhizopods ? You see what a greedy devil I am ! Did you

^ ‘ The Fresh-water Rhizopods of North America.’ Report of the U. S.
Geological Survey, vol xii, 1879.

Aet. 35

Cherishing Old Men 245

find any memoranda in his papers about the Biological Club ? He
was the life of the club & the member about whom we all used to
rotate — Mitchell, Franklin Go wen, Chapman, Hunt, Wistar and
SelleisA

As has been seen, Osier had a particularly warm spot in his
heart for men of an older generation, whom he always treated
like contemporaries ; and if in the course of conversation
a person’s years were in question he was wont to reply :
^ Oh, he ’s just our age.’ What he said in a later address,^
appreciative of Alfred Stille, ezpressed the feelings he always
held for an aged member of the profession, who had kept up
with the stream :

So far as I know, the chapter on the old man in the profession
has not yet been written. To-day, as in the sixteenth century, the
bitter mot of Rabelais is true . ‘ There be more old drunkards than
old physicians.’ Take the list of Fellows of our College, look over
the names and dates of graduation of the practitioners of this city,
and the men above seventy years of age form, indeed, a small remnant.
All the more reason that we should cherish and reverence them. It
interested me greatly in Dr. Stills, and I only knew him after he had
passed his seventieth year, to note the keenness of his mind on all
questions relating to medicine. He had none of those unpleasant
senile vagaries, the chief characteristic of which is an intense passion
for opposition to everything that is new. He had that delightful
equanimity and serenity of mind which is one of the blessed accom-
paniments of old age. He had none of those irritating features of
the old doctor who, having crawled out of the stream about his
fortieth year, sits on the bank croaking of misfortunes to come, and
with less truth than tongue lamenting the days that have gone, and
the men of the past. He was not like the sage of Agrigentum of
whom Matthew Arnold sings :

Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d
By other rules than are in vogue to-day ;

Whose habit of thought was fix’d, who will not change
But, in a world he loves not, must subsist
In ceaseless opposition,

^ The sketch forwarded by Leidy’s nephew is of a magnified Menofonferale
drawn on the back of a ‘ Penn Club ’ card of invitation. With the possible
exception of this single example, the I-reidy drawings had all been deposited
in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia of which the Biological
Club was an outgrownh.

^ Unrjeuiiy of Pennsylvania Medical Bulletin, June 1902.

246 University of Pennsylvania jan- April 1885

1885

During all the previous autumn, when time permitted,
he had probably been preparing for his Goulstonian Lec-
tures, which were built up from his Montreal material ;
and, as indicated, he chose as his subject ‘ Malignant
Endocarditis ’ (acute valvular disease of the heart), on which
he was able to speak not only with authority but with
considerable originality.

In 1632 a bequest of £200 had been left to the Royal
College of Physicians by Dr. Goulston for the maintenance
of an annual lectureship, ‘ to be read by one of the four
youngest doctors in physic of the said college . . . between
Michaelmas and Easter on three days together both forenoon
and afternoon,’ for an honorarium of £ 10 . Thus the
Goulstonian Lectureship for 250 years had been handed
out as a form of compliment to the youngest of the F ellows,
reckoned on the basis of their appointment. As has been
seen, both Osier and Allbutt were made Fellows in 1883,
and though Allbutt in age was several years the senior, his
was the last name on the list and hence he was the youngest
Fellow in point of duration of his fellowship. For this or
some other reason Allbutt had been selected as lecturer
in 1884, and as no new Fellows were appointed in that year
Osier was given the lectureship for the ensuing one.

Though he had already written a number of occasional
papers on the subject of endocarditis, these lectures, which
were delivered in London on February 26th, March 3rd and
5 th, contained the first comprehensive account in English
of the disease, and did much to bring the subject to the
attention of clinicians.’- If one may j udge from an enthusi-
astic account sent home by a quondam pupil,^ who admits
he ‘ scarcely kept his seat, with emotion ’, they must have
been warmly received. In the intervals between his lectures
he probably made a succession of visits, overlooking none

^ Orth’s successful experiments in producing valvular endocarditis in
animals which Osier made the subject of an editorial {Medical News, Oct. 24,
1885) were not known until later in the year Osier had made a few experi-
mental observations himself which were inconclusive. His contribution was
largely clinical and pathological, not experimental.

^ Letter to the Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, Mar. 1885, xiii. 488.

Aet. 35

The Goulstonian Lectures

247

of his old London friends ; and probably, too, was subjected
to the usual receptions and entertainments. He evidently
visited Horsley, then at work in the Brown Institution on
his experimental investigations of myxoedema in monkeys —
at least this may be inferred from an editorial on the subject
which appeared in the Medical News on April 4th soon
after Osier’s return.^ It was on this visit also in all probability
that Hawksley, the London instrument-maker, perfected
for him the type of binaural stethoscope, which replaced
the single-tube stethoscopes until then in common use in
Philadelphia and known as Pepper’s and Da Costa’s models.
With little variation in its construction, the next genera-
tion of medical students everywhere came to utilize this
new instrument ; but Osier carefully kept his name out
ofit.2

To F, J, Shepherdfrom W. 0 , 13 1 South 15th St.,

27/3/85

So glad to hear from you. Such a budget of Canadian letters
came in on Tuesday afternoon and not two minutes after, Sutherland,
Mills & Thornton. We had a veiy pleasant evening together — such
fun over the Exam papers in McGiU Gazette which also came in at
the same time. Mills took them in very good part. Poor devil !
I am sorry for him. I doubt if he will ever assimilate^ and I think
some position away from Doctors would be more suitable. Sorry
you will not be down this spring. Get Ross to join Gardner ; it
will do him good. I wish he would get away to England Sc drop
a great deal of his 2nd year work. As usual, I have been used much
better than my deserts. I mean in connection with the [Goulstonian]
lectures. It is a pity that I had not the appointment last year but
anyone can see they are virtually Montreal lectures. The more
I see here the more I think of the great advantages of the M.G.H.
and the general condition of things medical. So glad to hear from
Howard that there are prospects of an addition this summer. I am
well in harness again & can scaicely realize that I have been away.
Love to the children. Best regards to the Frau. If you ever come
across anything worth while with reference to the general Sc special

^ He was quick to see that it was the next important step in the untangling
of thyroid function since that taken by Kocher ; but it led him to make a
poor prophecy regarding the future of the surgery of the gland, though the
conclusions were doubtless justified by Horsley’s findings, which of course
did not take the parathyroids into consideration.

^ Cf. Wm. A. Edwards : ‘ A New Binaural Stethoscope Medical
News, Phila., Nov. 7, 1885, xlvii. 527.

24B University of Pennsylvania Apr. 1885

evolution of the profession let me know. I am thinking of some
such subjects for my address in August.

August and his address as President of the Canadian
Association were a long way ahead for one who did things
by the day, and he was meanwhile hard at work in other
directions. The editorial writing in connexion with the
Medical News he had assumed in large measure and, as
already stated, he was always ready to do more than his
share. It was evidently his intention to issue a third
Pathological Report from the Montreal General, in which
his full series, amounting to nearly 1,000 autopsies, could be
recorded. This is apparent from a foot-note to an article
on ‘ The Morbid Anatomy of Pneumonia ’ read before the
Pathological Society of Philadelphia on April 23rdd The
article was succeeded by another statistical study on ‘ The
Morbid Anatomy of Typhoid ’ published in August,^ but
like other good resolutions of the sort he had by this time
become so engrossed in new lines of work and was so nearly
swamped by undertaking a chapter for Pepper’s ‘ System of
Medicine’ that the project was abandoned; and Wyatt
Johnston’s brief list of his later Montreal autopsies is the
only printed record that remains.

But he was by no means to be a stranger at the autopsy
table, for even without any official appointment he managed
to continue wdth his work in morbid anatomy. He had
succeeded in evolving for himself the same sort of existence
he had so enjoyed in Montreal — a doctors’ dinner club,
an association with a group of men interested in medical
publications, his bedside hospital clinics, his detailed studies
of post-mortem appearances, and the reports of his observa-
tions before a local society. The Philadelphia Pathological
Society soon came to take the place of the Medico-Chirurgi-
cal Society of Montreal of which he had been so devoted and

^ ^ This, with other articles on morbid anatomy which will follow from
time to time, will constitute my third and last Pathological Report from the
Montreal General Hospital/ The paper was based on a series of 105 post-
mortem examinations of cases of lobar pneumonia. {Canada Medical and
Surgical Journal^ Jan. 1885, xiii. 596-605 }

2 This paper gives a study of 56 autopsies on typhoid cases. Its first few
pages not only exhibit the extent of his reading but show an historical trend
and charm of style beginning to be apparent in his writings.

Aet. 35 The New and the Old Pathology 249

active a member. Its minute-books show that long before
his election to membershipj which did not occur until
March 12, 1885, Osier had been a frequent guest. The
society at this time was a most active one, and it has been
stated that those who subsequently gained local eminence
in the profession were almost without exception men who
were frequent participants in its sessions. In one of his
later delightful addresses ^ Osier comments on the purposes
and value of medical societies ^ to foster professional unity
and friendship, to serve as a clearing-house in which every
physician of the district should receive his rating and learn
his professional assets and liabilities and so on :

In a city association the demonstration of instructive specimens
in morbid anatomy should form a special feature of the work. After
all has been done, many cases of great obscurity in our daily rounds
remain obscure, and as post-mortems are few and far between, the
private practitioner is at a great disadvantage since his mistakes in
diagnosis are less often corrected than are those of hospital physicians.
No more instructive woik is possible than carefully demonstrated
specimens illustrating disturbance of function and explanatory of the
clinical symptoms. It is hard in this country to have the student
see enough morbid anatomy, the aspects of which have such an
important bearing upon the mental attitude of the growing doctor.
For the crass therapeutic credulity, so widespread to-day, and upon
which our manufacturing chemists wax fat, there is no more potent
antidote than the healthy scepticism bred of long study in the post-
mortem room. The new pathology, so fascinating and so time-
absorbing, tends, I fear, to grow away from the old morbid anatomy,
a training in which is of such incalculable advantage to the physician.
It IS a subject which one must learn in the medical school, but the
time assigned is rarely sufficient to give the student a proper grasp
of the subject. The younger men should be encouraged to make
the exhibition of specimens part of the routine work of each meeting.
Something may be learned from the most ordinary case if it is
presented with the special object of illustrating the relation of
disturbed function to altered structure.

Osier’s first presentation before the Pathological Society
was on April 9th, and Dr. R. M. Landis writes that during
the four years of his active membership, in the little first-
floor corner room at the old College of Physicians where

^ ^ On the Educational Value of the Medical Society.’ Read on the occa-
sion of the centennial celebration of the New Haven Medical Society, Jan. 6,
1903. Boston Medical and Surgical Jcfurnal, 1903, cxlviii, 275,

250 University of Pennsylvania Apr. 1885

the society met^ he appeared before it no less than fifty-two
times. Just as in Montreal, it was seldom that he did not
have some interesting specimen to show, some new technical
method to demonstrate, or some subject of interest to
present in relation to comparative pathology ; for though
the opportunity in Philadelphia was less, since the Veterinary
Department of the University had only just been established,
he took advantage of every possible occasion to pursue his
studies of disease in the lower animals. The following
letter to H. V. Ogden, written at about this time, shows how
he kept abreast of the newer laboratory methods, for Hans
Gram’s procedure for the differential staining of bacteria
had just been published.

131 S 15th St.

Tuesday.

Your very nice sections & photos came safely. That from the
tumour of foot is evidently myeloid sarcoma, springing doubtless as
they sometimes do, from the periosteum. The other, I am in doubt
as to the true nature of & have not yet gone over it very carefully.
You will have quite a nice microscopical section. Have you used
Gram’s method for staining bacilli and micrococci? It is excep-
tionally good. [He proceeds to fill a page with most minute details.]
Do you get good staining fluids in Milwaukee ? R. & J. Beck Optic,
here (on Chestnut St) keeps good magenta fluid for Bacillus tubercul.
rapid method, & Hayes, Chemist, Cor. Broad & Walnut, makes good
Gent, and Methyl violet stains & Bis. brown. If you don’t get
them good in M. let me send you some. I shall send you a copy
of my Goulstonian lectures in a day or so. Was in Toronto for
Easter. All well. Saw Reynolds in Hamilton. He seems thriving.
Do you go to New Orleans? I shall go to Winnipeg by the Lakes.
Feel quite at home here now. A few consultations have come in.
Finished exams. Methods very much behind McGill. Men are
pretty bright. Let me know about the stains. So much depends
on getting them well made. If you would like some good slides of
T. Bacilli or top covers charged with sputum containing them say
the word. Yours ever,

The consultations had been few indeed — not that he
much minded. They are noted in his account-book. There
were seven in January, and from February to May only
two — at least only two from which fees were collected.
It is evident that he was keeping up with pathology, and
much of his staining and section-cutting, which must have

Aet. 35 Blockley Hospital 251

been ^ free hand ’ for the most part, was probably done in
his makeshift laboratory at the University Hospital. It is
recalled that he always carried in his pockets a small bottle
or two containing some tissue fixative, and when the
opportunity offered of securing some specimen or piece of
tissue that needed study, he would take a fragment away
with him for microscopic examination.

Most of these fragments, in all likelihood, came from the
Blockley ’ Hospital. This venerable institution, originally
the Philadelphia Alms-house, which in 1742 was ^ fulfilling
a varied routine of beneficent functions has just claim
to be the oldest hospital in the States. Having migrated
twice during the growth of the city, it finally in 1834 moved
from the ^ Bettering House ^ in what is now the heart of
Philadelphia, to a farm in the suburbs in the then township
of Blockley on the west side of the Schuylkill. Here, far
out in the country, the indigent poor and afflicted, the
alcoholic and insane of Philadelphia came to be housed —
went over the hill to the poorhouse ’ ; and in the early
days when Alfred Stille served his six months as Resident
Physician, patients were bled wholesale, the place was
infested with politics, and had the ^ immortal smell of an
alms-house ^ In those days the medical students visiting
Blockley used to cross the Schuylkill by the south ferry
to a landing on the alms-house grounds to avoid the longer
way round over the Market Street bridge. But Philadelphia
was rapidly coming to envelop Blockley Township, and in
1 870, a few years after Stille’s brother Charles became Provost
of the University, the first group of buildings, chiefly
medical ones, encased in the green serpentine stone then
so much in fashion, were erected on part of the old Blockley
estate which had been lopped oft from the dwindling pro-
perty originally owned by the alms-house. The move had
been made with reluctance, for the University thereby lost
contact with the old Pennsylvania Hospital ; but in a few
years a hospital of its own in the same architectural style was
erected alongside the original medical building, adjacent
to but with its back turned haughtily upon the architec-
turally unpretentious old Blockley buildings with their
quadrangle of some twenty acres.

252 University of Pennsylvania Apr. 1885

Owing to the proximity of these institutions, for those
accustomed to making short cuts it was possible to leave the
University Hospital by the rear entrance and enter the
Blockley enclosure by a postern gate in the old wall. The
advantage of this lay in the fact that near this gate stood
the little two-story red brick building which served in
Osier’s day as the half-way house to the Potter’s Field, and
here almost every afternoon he was to be found with the
group of students accustomed to camp on his trail.^
Blockley even then was a huge place, not unlike the
Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna, or the Salpetriere in
Paris, with over two thousand inmates, many of them with
interesting chronic maladies ; and the opportunity for
post-mortem studies was unusually good.

There were at this time two officially appointed patho-
logists — good men too — E. O. Shakespeare and Henry F.
Formad, the coroner’s physician; but they probably were
busy elsewhere or had less insatiable curiosity about disease
than had Osier, nor did they have a pack of students at
their heels. The old servant in the dead-house quickly saw
the difference, and whenever an examination had been
waived as without particular interest, since no one had come
to conduct it, Osier was certain to be informed and to
appear with his followers. This finally reached a point at
which regulations had to be made that no one should
perform an autopsy without the written consent of the
official pathologists; but in time Osier himself received^
a Blockley appointment.^

Many of the labours engaged in by physicians in the
dissecting-room are repulsive enough, and those of the dead-
house still more so, for there are tasks to perform which
a chambermaid or stable-boy would shrink from under-
taking ; and as O. W. Holmes once said : ^ We cannot
w’-onder that the sensitive Rousseau could not endure the

^ A vivid description of Blockley in tlie ’8o’s from the standpoint of
a student-interne is given in ‘ BlocMey Days ^ by Arthur Ames Bliss, 1916.
Cf. also J Chalmers Da Costa’s ‘ Old Blockley Hospital Journal American
Meitcd Association^ April ii, 1908.

^ His election occurred at a meeting of the Board of Guardians, December
28, 1885, at which time seven other physicians were appointed, among whom
were his friends Tyson, Wilson, and Mussei.

Aet. 35 The Post-mortem Room 253

atmosphere of the room in which he had begun a course of
anatomical study. But we know that the great painters,
Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Raphael, must have witnessed
many careful dissections, and what they endured for art,
our students can endure for science and humanity.’ At the
present time the Pathological Department at Blockley is
housed in a magnificent institute under the diiection of
a man who values tradition. But in Osier’s day there were
none of the modern appurtenances one associates with
a laboratory — nothing, indeed, but a storage vault and the
small room with its stone table on which the examinations
were made. That any special post-mortem records what-
soever, under these circumstances, should have been kept
is remarkable ; and though he never held an appointment
as pathologist, the opportunity to perform an autopsy was
never lost and the volumes contain 162 of these records in
his own unmistakable chirography. No less than forty-eight
of these were cases of pulmonary tuberculosis, an evidence
of the fact that he felt there was always something to learn
from an examination, no matter how familiar the patho-
logical picture was likely to be. Dr. William T, Sharpless,
one of the Blockley internes of the time, writes :

I have most distinct recollections of the Sundays when he came
early in the morning and spent the whole day in making necropsies,
which we saved for him so far as it was possible to do so. I have
known him to begin at 8.00 in the morning and continue at this
work until evening. He would hunt for hours to find the small
artery concerned in a pulmonary haemorrhage or the still smaller
one whose rupture produced a hemiplegia. If he found something
especially interesting he would send out the runner to get all the
boys and show what a wonderful thing he had found and how
interesting and instructive it was. Once in the ward class there was
a big coloured man whom he demonstrated as showing all the
classical symptoms of croupous pneumonia. The man came to
autopsy later. He had no pneumonia but a chest full of fluid. Dr.
Osier seemed delighted, sent especially for all those in his ward
classes, showed them what a mistake he had made, how it might
have been avoided and how careful they should be not to repeat it.
In thirty years of practice since that time, whenever I have been
called upon to decide between these two conditions I remember
that case. I am sure that it had the same effect upon the other
members of the class that it had on me and was certainly the right
sort of medical teaching. . . .

254

University of Pennsylvania May-June 1885

To F, J. Shepherd from W, 0 , University Club,

Friday [May 1885]

When did you fellows get the notion that I was coming up on
the 20th ? I cannot possibly. I have been away so much (in Toronto
April 5th) and am full of work with our short spring session, having
four classes a week. And lastly & most important, I must try to
economize this year as I am still in arrears, and expenses here are
very heavy, though I am living most quietly. I do hope Campbell
will not beat Mac. It will be too bad ; still I have but little fear
of the result. So glad to hear that the building operations have
begun. I have written to Kerr, Sullivan & others about the meeting.
If there is any prospect of a failure we had better postpone the
Winnipeg meeting & hold the session somewhere in the East, Poor
Molson ! It would have been a sad thing for the Gunn Artillery
[Riel rebellion] ; I could not go on to N. Y. to see him. He should
have come on here. I am struggling towards a little consultation
work. Mitchell is most kind in this matter & I have seen some
interesting cases with him. That glanders case will make an inter-
esting communication. I hope Howard has saved some specimens.
Love to the chicks.

Campbell did not beat Mac ’ though it was a close
contest, for on June 21st the Montreal General Hospital
Board announced that Dr. Richard MacDonnell had been
appointed to fill the vacancy occasioned by Dr. Osier’s
resignation, having received 93 votes against the 71 ‘for
Dr. F. W. Campbell, the rival candidate, who, however,
was made an assistant physician. The ^ building operations ’
are to be explained later in a letter from Palmer Howard.

It was at about this time, in May and June of this year,
that two editorials appeared in Ross’s journal, possibly only
inspired but more probably written by Osier, and telling,
as dispassionately as possible for the benefit of his Canadian
friends, the story of a lamentable altercation which had
arisen among the profession in the States.^ This episode
directly or indirectly affected most of the prominent
American physicians, for long disturbed their cordial
relations to the American Medical Association, and must
have been particularly distressing to one like Osier, whose
nature ^ sloped towards the sunny side The story has

^ ‘ The International Medical Congress.’ Canada Medical and Surgical
Journal, June 1885, and July 1885, xiii. 696, 762 Also Feb 1886, xiv. 437.

Aet. 35 Defence of Others 255

been told in sufficient detail in Garrison’s ^Life of John S.
Billings whom it chiefly concerned ; and the only reason
for mentioning Osier’s part in it is to show how ready he was
to take up cudgels in defence of others when he saw injustice
being done. An invitation which originated with the
American Medical Association to hold the IXth Inter-
national Congress in Washington had been accepted, and
the energetic Billings, as Chairman of the Committee of
Organization, had perfected a programme which would
have ensured the success of this formidable undertaking had
not certain malcontents, dragging cheap medical politics
into an international event, succeeded, at a meeting of the
^ A. M. A.’ in New Orleans, in repudiating the action of
Billings’s committee. This involved making charges later
on against a number of eminent men included in Billings’s
provisional list of officers, on the grounds that they were
not supporters of the code of ethics adopted by the Associa-
tion. These were men of unquestioned repute but ot
independent views, like Jacobi and Loomis of New York,
and Henry 1. Bowditch of Boston ; and Osier was sufficiently
aroused to call a meeting of the prominent Philadelphians,
who passed resolutions declining to hold any office whatso-
ever in connexion with the Congress as newly organized.
Osier made a copy of these resolutions which he sent the
same day to H. P. Bowditch with the following explanatory
note :

131 S isth St. Phila.

29th [June]

I enclose you resolutions of Phila meeting to-day anent Congress.
Have wiitten Chadwick Sc Warren asking them to call meeting of
Boston men to express their views of the situation and if feasible to
send a Committee to join ours at Flints & urge upon him the advis-
ability of the old Committee resuming its functions and going ahead
in spite of all opposition, or failing this — at any rate to refuse to lend
his name to the organization as at present constituted. We all feel
very sore about the removal of your dear uncle from the vice-
presidency, an insult which all respectable members of the profession
must resent and which in itself is sufficient ground for severing
connection with the men who have got control at present. . , .

The Philadelphia resolutions were followed by similar ones
passed both in Boston and Baltimore. It is quite possible

256 University of Pennsylvania Aug. 1885

that this action was taken overhastily ; quite possible, too,
that there was some justification in the umbrage felt in
the South and West that the better-known men in the
larger cities of the East were unnecessarily well represented
on Billings’s original committee. However this may be,
and it is not very vital to-day, the enlarged original com-
mittee withdrew practically in a body, and, instead of
eminence, mediocrity came to control the Congress. This
unfortunate episode, which for months filled the medical
press of America ^ and Europe with public discussion of
a petty action, caused a rift in the profession which it took
years to smooth over. That Osier felt strongly in the matter
is shown by the series of editorials in Ross’s journal, but
being a man who never harboured a grievance he did not
let this controversy affect his subsequent relations with the
association. For, with others, he realized that in spite of
its having been led astray by designing, ambitious, and
selfish men, the A. M. A. would continue to represent the
great body of the profession and, with experience, its
leaders would come to realize that science recognizes no
sectional lines.

During a part of August Osier was evidently in Toronto,
dividing his time between his immediate family and the
Francis cousins who had left Montreal. He was meanwhile
writing editorials, reviews ^ of the books he was reading,
and getting his presidential address into shape for the
Canadian Medical Association meeting which, on account
of the disorders in Manitoba, was to be held in Chatham in
Western Ontario. As is shown by the following note from
Palmer Howard, he had written for information, for his
immediate purposes, regarding the official Acts regulating
the practice of medicine in the Province. Moreover,

^ The Meitcal News and the TiantacUons of the Amencan Medical Associa-
tion contain full accounts of this historical squabble from opposite points
of view. The discussion, reaching Europe, was participated in hy Paget,
Virchow, and others, to the humiliation of the better element among the
profession in America.

® One of them dealt with Stille’s ‘ Treatise on Asiatic Cholera for this
was the summer of the last serious cholera epidemic in Europe and there
were fears of its reaching America. Epidemics were rife, with yellow fever
on the rampage in Vera Cruz and small-pox again in Montreal.

Aet. 36 A Presidential Address 257

Howard had evidently booked him for a later address in the
autumn :

From Palmer Howard to W, O. Montreal Aug. 24

On the enclosed slip are some statements that may answer your
queries. The Act wh. regulated our affairs was that of George
the III. Then came the Act — 4th & 5th Victoria, providing for
reciprocal rights in Upper & Lower Canada. This was succeeded
by the Act incorporating the Prof, in this Prov. in 1847 — loth year
of Victoria — I was writing this letter when yours of the 22nd arrived.
We hope to be ready for the ist but may not be and personally
I am so desirous that you should be with us & give the address that
I feel we ought to postpone the opening till Monday the 5th —
That w*^ allow of you delivering y^ own opening lecture on the ist
& coming up to us for Saturday the 3rd or Monday the 5th. Dawson
will not return until the ist or 2nd of Sept & nothing can or will
be settled until after your Chatham meeting. We shall hope to
have a meeting of the Faculty on Saturday Ev“® the 5th by which
time yoUy Ross, Stewart, Shepherd etc. will have arrived. I am
greatly pleased that you have consented to come down on the 5th
and spend Sunday with me. If you came down with Ross, Stewart
& Shepherd you might talk over the affair with them so that at the
meeting on Saturday they may have some ideas & views to present
of a promising and useful nature.

How would it do to postpone the formal opening till the second
or third week in Oct^. & begin the ordinary work without an opening
address on the ist ? I w^ prefer the other way, but if it cant be
accomplished, why it cant. What Canadian physicians do you
think might be asked to attend the ceremony & who w*^ be most
eligible to make a short address ? Would McD^ or Mullin or Malloch
of Hamilton be likely to come? or who in Toronto or London?
Oh for a half hour’s chat with you ! In the meantime make your
calculation that you will have to open the new building with an
address from your ever active brain. We are busy vaccinating ^ and

^ ^ The disease [smallpox] smoulders here and there m different localities,
and when conditions are favourable becomes epidemic. This was well
illustrated by the celebrated Montreal outbreak of 1885. For several years
there had been no small-pox in the city, and a large unprotected population
grew up among the French-Canadians, many of whom were opposed to
vaccination. On February 28th a Pullman-car conductor, who had travelled
from Chicago where the disease had been slightly prevalent, was admitted
into the Hotel-Dieu, the civic small-pox hospital being at the time closed.
Isolation was not earned out, and on the 1st of April a servant in the hospital
died of small-pox. Follotving her decease, with a negligence absolutely
criminal, the authorities of the hospital dismissed all patients presenting no
symptoms of contagion who could go home. The disease spread like fire in
2923.1 s

258 ‘ The Growth of a Profession ’ Sept. 1885

nothing more ; except fuming at plasterers carpenters etc. Jared
desires his kind regards to be added to mine. Yours very truly,

R. P. Howard.

As President of the association, yet able to look upon the
situation of the Canadian profession through the eyes of
a teacher in another country, Osier’s position gave him
opportunity for a plain straightforward talk intended for
ears other than those of his immediate auditors.^ He
divided his subject, which concerned in general the growth
and development of the profession, into three topics : the
organized profession, the medical school, and the medical
society ; and in the address, which was for him a long one,
he dwelt seriously for the first time upon a number of topics
which throughout his life he continued to harp upon — the
preliminary education of a doctor, the regulation of the
medical curriculum, the raising of admission-requirements
to the schools, the lengthening of the course, the importance
of a proper Federal Bureau of Registration which should
have^ the licensing power ; the need of supporting the
Provincial boards of health; of regular attendance at
medical-society meetings to which every one should come,
both to learn and bring something he can teach. It was
characteristic of him to add :

By no means the smallest advantage of our meetings is the pro-
motion of harmony and good-fellowship. Medical men, particularly
in smaller places, live too much apart and do not see enough of each
other. In large cities we rub each other’s angles down and carom

dry grass, and within nine months there died in the city of smallpox 3,164
persons.^ (Osier’s ‘ Practice of Medicine ’.)

^ The Growth of a Profession.’^ Canada M.edtcal and Surgical youtnal.
Oct. 1885, XIV. 129.

At this same meeting he was down for a paper on ‘ The Clinical and
Pathological Relations of the Caecum and Appendix which apparently was
read but not published, possibly because the pressure of preparing his more
formal address had prevented its completion. Had it been, it would have
antedated Fitz’s classical paper on the subject by two years ; and it has been
mentioned that he had presented to the Medico-Chirurgical Society in 1880
a case of perforation of the appendix with circumscribed abscess perforating
into the bowel. What probably represented the substance of his remarks was
not published until a year or two after the ideas regarding primary appendi-
cular inflammations and perforative appendicitis had been generally ascribed
to Fitz, who like Osier had first gained his knowledge of them as a
pathologist rather than a clinician.

Aet. 36

Boils and Blains

259

off each other without feeling the shock very much, but it is an
unfortunate circumstance that in many towns, the friction being
on a small surface, hurts and mutual misunderstandings arise to the
destruction of all harmony. As a result of this may come a pro-
fessional isolation with a corroding influence of a most disastrous
nature, converting a genial, good fellow in a few years into a bitter
old Timon, railing against the practice of medicine in general and
his colleagues in particular. As a preventive of such a malady,
attendance upon our annual gatherings is absolute, as a cure it is
specific. But I need not dwell on this point — he must indeed be
a stranger in such meetings as ours who has not felt the glow of
sympathy and affection as the hand of a brother worker has been
grasped in kindly fellowship.

He must have gone on to see Howard immediately after
this meeting and then have rushed back to Philadelphia, for
he sends word to his sister in Dundas that he is ^ treating
her shabbily but must be back on Friday \ He could not
have been very well, for his mother writes on September 14th
and ventures to prescribe for him :

I could not help feeling worried about that horrid carbuncle
though I felt you were in the best of hands for treatment and
nursing at Dr. Howard’s. Being vaccinated while that was going
on must have been very sickening ; you will need some good atten-
tion and I hope will prescribe the best of everything for your dear
self so there may be no repetition of those evil things if you were
able to leave as intended on Thursday we shall look for a note to-
morrow and hope to hear that you are much better — would not
preparation of Wyeth’s beef, wine and iron, be good for you to take
and no trouble if you kept it at hand you know that or good beef
tea would be good for others and if you indulge in boils you ought
also to take the remedies required to heal them.

And in her chronicles of the family doings of the next
week, she hopes his ^ boils and blains are clean gone ’ after
a few days at the sea with the Hays, and adds that they had
all enjoyed reading the President’s address at Chatham and
that ^ Aunt [Pickton] thought it equal the wisdom of
107 years of experience — sound sense it certainly was

It was customary for him to spend a week or two each
summer with the Hays at Point Pleasant on the New
Jersey coast. He was given a room on the top floor and
was accustomed to spend a part of his day writing, a task
often interrupted, however, by his unannounced visits to

26o Founding a Society Oct. 1885

the nursery or the sewing-room, where the Hays children
would be found, and where another chapter would be told
from the story of Arabella Elizabeth, ‘ a rude little girl who
used to put out her tongue, and one day was struck by
a fairy’s wand because of this habit and went through the
earth all the way to Australia, and when she got there found
she could not get her tongue back and had, in consequence,
a series of most awful times.’

Quite possibly as an outcome of the squabbles over the
International Medical Congress, it had seemed desirable
for the leading physicians of the country to organize a
society similar to that which had already been formed for
the surgeons by the senior Gross some five years before.
Accordingly, on October 10, 1885, at the office of Dr. Dela-
field, Drs. Draper and George L. Peabody of New York,
R. T. Edes of Boston, Pepper, Tyson, and Osier of Phila-
delphia being present, the Association of American
Physicians had its birth. Who originally suggested this
organization is not recorded, but probably it was Osier,
who later on was responsible for similar foundations.^
A name for the proposed society was decided upon ;
a committee composed of Edes, Peabody, and Osier was
appointed to draw up the necessary plans of organization ;
and there was a full discussion of the men who were regarded
as eligible for such an association as was contemplated.

As indicated in Howard’s letter of August 24th, plans
were under way for the opening of the new building of the
McGill Medical Faculty, which had been made possible by
Strathcona’s original gift. It is probable that in reply to
Howard’s inquiry Osier had suggested Pepper’s name as the
chief speaker on the occasion. At all events they went on

^ la his memoir of William Pepper {Philadelphia Medical Journal, Mar. i8,
1899), Osier says : ‘ For many years those of us whose work lay in the special
field of medicine had felt that a society was needed in which we could meet
our fellows in the same line of work As early as i88i I had written to
Dr. Tyson, shortly after my first visit to Philadelphia, urging the organization
of such a body, but it was not until the winter of 1885-d that the imtial steps
were taken ... I remember well m the preliminary meetings how by tacit
consent Dr Pepper assumed the headship, and in formulating the details
and in arranging the final orgamzation his executive abilities made the work
Very easy.’

Aet. 36 Taxing his Strength 261

together from Philadelphia for the ceremonies which had
been postponed to October 22nd. There, before a gathering
of distinguished guests, of whom the Hon. Donald A. Smith,
who made the occasion possible, was naturally the central
figure, Osier’s appearance was greeted ‘ with prolonged
cheering ’ on the part of the students ; and though he was
the first called upon by Howard to speak, his remarks were
brief and he gave way promptly to Pepper, who in his usual
brilliant style delivered the principal address.

In view of his labours to improve medical standards of
education in the States through the example of his own
school. Pepper had been a wise choice as speaker. He
pleaded for the better endowment of medical schools, ‘ so
as to secure fixed salaries for the professors, who would then
cease to have any pecuniary interest in the size of their
classes ’ ; and he referred to other munificent gifts to
medicine during the past decade — those of Johns Hopkins,
of Mrs. John Rhea Barton, of Vanderbilt, and of Carnegie.
The customary dinner followed, and ‘ after the loyal toasts
and that of the President of the United States were given ’,
Osier was called upon to speak of medical education in the
United States and Canada. This he did in no doubtful
terms, and in referring to his brethren ‘ south of the line ’,
and to the many anomalies of the profession in their country,
he is quoted as saying : ‘ How it is that such a shrewd
practical people as those in the United States should have
drifted into such a loose, slipshod way of conducting medical
schools is unintelligible.’

He must have been somewhat exhausted by all this —
what with his ‘ boils and blains ’ — for after Sunday supper
with Pepper the night of their return he noted in his
account-book : ‘ Weighed on Pepper’s scales to-night.

138|- lbs. Thin underclothing, no overcoat, thin frock
coat.’ ^ This does not sound as though he was particularly
fit to start in with his school work ; and when one considers
the number of his active interests there was perhaps

^ The ‘ thin frock coat ’ betrays the cu stom of the day, especially for
a physician, and even more for a Canadian one. His friend Chadwick of
Boston was once called to Montreal m consultation, and appearing in tweeds,
was not permitted to see the patient till he had been properly outfitted.

262 University of Pennsylvania Dec. 1885

sufficient excuse for him to be somewhat run down. He
does not appear, however, to have ever admitted to others
such a thing as fatigue — far less to himself. His literary
activities during the preceding year, taken alone, must have
been a considerable tax on his strength and show his
enormous industry ; for published in the Medical News
alone, for the year, thirty of the editorials ^ and nine book-
reviews have been traced to him, and there is no telling
how many more may have gone to Ross. All this was apart
from his less fugitive writings like the Goulstonian Lectures
and, above all, the important chapters in Pepper’s ‘ System
of Medicine ’. These dealt with the diseases of the blood,
of the blood-glandular system, and of the heart, constitut-
ing an eighty-five-page treatise in itself® — one of the most
important sections in this encyclopaedic publication of five
volumes.

Most of the distinguished men, whose participation in
this elaborate ‘ System ’ Pepper had secured, were the same
as those who came to be the founders of the Association of
American Physicians. On December 29th a second meeting
was held in Delafield’s office, at which Drs. Loomis of New
York, R. P. Howard of Montreal, Minot, Fitz, and the two
Shattucks of Boston were present, in addition to those who
attended the earlier meeting in October. It was decided

^ Some of tkem show the wide range of his interests : for example, that
on ‘ Medicine in China \ inspired hy the Annual Report of the Soochow
Hospital and concluding with the statement that ‘ m the modern crusade the
stethoscope has replaced the sword Another on ‘ The Imperial Customs
Medical Reports ’ dwells on the researches of Patrick Manson into the role
of mosquitoes in human pathology which he had run across in this obscure
publication. Many of the editorials, like those on the recent discoveries
concerning actinomycosis and hydrophobia, are an indication of his continued
interest in the diseases common to man and animals. None of the newer
subjects escaped him, and many of the editorials were reviews of the more
recent papers in the leading French and German periodicals to which he had
access at the College of Physicians. One may identify many of the editorials
by internal evidence, as that on the ‘ Death of Dr, Wm. B. Carpenter ’
(Medical News, Nov. 14, 1885, xlvii. 546), whose name he couples with that
of Huxley and Owen and whose works on Comparative Pathology, and the
Microscope, were often consulted in his days at Weston with ‘ Father ’
Johnson.

^ The style of these admirable articles is unmistakably that which in fuller
development was to make his Text-book of Medicine such a successful work.

Aet. 36 Not much of Willie 263

that the number of members should be limited to one
hundred. Delafield was chosen President, with Tyson as
Secretary ; and a circular was sent out to the selected
candidates with the announcement of the first meeting to
be held in Washington the following June. He had been
home for his usual Christmas visit before this meeting, but
his mother wrote : ‘ We did not see much of Willie, as he
was soon off to New York with Dr. Howard.’

Aet. 36

Walt Whitman

265

and where does he live ? ’ It was very stupid of me as I should have
remembered that a few years before when Dr. Bucke had been
a guest at one of our Club dinners in Montreal he had startled us
into doubts of his sanity by extravagant praises of one Walt Whitman,
a new seer of a new era, whom he classed with our Saviour, Buddha,
and Mahomet. Then I remembered, too, to have seen notices of
a book he had written about Whitman ; but I had no idea where
the prophet lived. The next morning I had the answer : ‘ Mr.
Walter Whitman, 328 Mickle Street, Camden.’ In the afternoon
I crossed the Delaware River ferry and in a ‘ clean, quiet democratic
street ’ I found the little, old-fashioned two-story frame house.
A pleasant middle-aged woman answered the door, to whom I showed
Dr. Bucke’s telegram. ‘ He will be glad to see you — anyone from
Dr. Bucke. Mr. Whitman is better to-day and downstairs.’ The
door opened into what appeared to be a room, but I had no little
difficulty at first in getting my bearings. I have seen what the tidy
housewife calls a ‘ clutter ’, but nothing to compare with the front
room, ground floor of No. 328 Mickle Street. At the corner, near
the window, the head and upper part of a man were visible — every-
where else, covering the floor, the chairs and the table, were, to use
his own description, ‘ heaps of books, manuscripts, memoranda,
scissorings, proof-sheets, pamphlets, newspapers, old and new maga-
zines, mysterious-looking literary bundles tied up with stout strings.’
The magazines and newspapers, piled higher than the desk, covered
the floor so completely that I had to pick my way by the side of the
wall of the room to get to the desk. I thought of Prof. Teufel’s
room in ‘ Sartor Resartus ’. After a hearty greeting, I had some
difficulty in explaining that I did not come directly from Dr. Bucke,
but that he had sent me over from Philadelphia to find out how he
was. There was nothing serious the matter — a transient indis-
position which had passed away. With a large frame, and well-
shaped, well poised head, covered with a profusion of snow-white
hair, which mingled on the cheeks with a heavy long beard and
moustache, Walt Whitman in his 65 th year was a fine figure of
a man who had aged beautifully, or more properly speaking, majestic-
ally, The eyebrows were thick and shaggy, and the man seemed
lost in a hirsute canopy. . . . My visit was made without any of that
preparation — that expectation, upon which Gideon Harvey dwells
as influencing so profoundly our feelings. I knew nothing of Walt
Whitman and had never read a line of his poems — a Scythian visitor
at Delphi ! . . . That evening at the Club after dinner I opened
the volume of ^ Leaves of Grass ’ for the first time. Whether the
meat was too strong, or whether it was the style of cooking — ’twas
not for my pampered palate, accustomed to Plato and Shakespeare
and Shelley and Keats. This has been a common experience ; even
Dr. Bucke acknowledging that ‘ for many months I could see abso-
lutely nothing in the book and would even ‘ throw it down in

266 University of Pennsylvania jan me

a sort of rage Whitman himself has expressed this feeling better
than anyone else, speaking of his ‘ strange voice and acknowledging
that critics and lovers of poetry may well be excused the ‘ chilly and
unpleasant shudders which will assuredly run through them, to their
very blood and bones ’ when they first read him, and exclaim : ‘ If
this is poetry, where must its foregoers stand ? ’ . . . At this time, of
the two men Bucke interested me more. Though a hero-worshipper,
it was a new experience in my life to witness such an absolute idolatry.
Where my blurred vision saw only a fine old man, full of common
sense and kindly feelings, Bucke felt himself in the presence of one
of the world’s great prophets. One evening after dinner at the
Rittenhouse Club with Dr. Chapin, Dr. Tyson, Dr. J. K. Mitchell
and a few others who I knew would appreciate him, I drew Bucke
on to tell the story of Whitman’s influence. The perfervid disciple,
who talks like [Chaerephon] in the [Apology] is not often met with in
these matter-of-fact days. It was an experience to hear an elderly
man — looking a venerable seer — ^with absolute abandonment tell how
‘ Leaves of Grass ’ had meant for him spiritual enlightenment,
a new power in life, new joys in a new existence on a plane higher
than he had ever hoped to reach. All this with the accompanying
physical exaltation expressed by dilated pupils and intensity of
utterance that were embarrassing to uninitiated friends. This
incident illustrates the type of influence exercised by Whitman on
his disciples — a cult of a type such as no other literary man of our
generation has been the object. . . ,

In like vein, through several manuscript pages of what is
the first uncorrected draft of an unpublished address, he
proceeds to tell of subsequent visits the next year or two,
during which time he ^ gradually came to realize what
Whitman’s life and message meant to his followers

So there were occasional consultations which gave him
contact with interesting people, but it was his students that
chiefly occupied his time. His formal exercises as arranged
for him in the curriculum could not have represented during
this time a particularly satisfactory portion of his week’s
schedule, and he was at his best with volunteer groups of
students in the dispensary or at Blockley. Years later, in
1915, referring in general to the period of medical teaching
antedating the new order of things which came about
through the example of the Johns Hopkins, he said : ^

Twenty-five years ago there was not a single medical clinic worth
the name in the United States. A most pernicious system prevailed

^ ‘ The Coming of Age of Internal Medicine in America.’ Internauonal
Chutes, Phila., 1915, IV. 1--5.

Aet. 36

Unorthodox Methods

267

— bad for the teacher, worse for the pupils. At the University of
Pennsylvania, Pepper held a Saturday clinic and gave two didactic
lectures weekly. I gave one clinic, and with Bruen and Fussell and
Jack Mitchell held classes in physical diagnosis, which were good
enough in their way but the students had no daily personal contact
with patients. There was abundant material, and between the
University Hospital, Blockley, and the Infirmary for Nervous
Diseases, where Henry W. Cattell was my assistant, I was for five
years very nearly a ^ whole-time ’ man. There was no clinical
laboratory, only an improvised room under the amphitheatre, which
was -very active the year George Dock was in charge.

He filled his prescribed lecture hours in most unorthodox
ways, and often utilized as texts subjects not in the books.
For example, the first time he met the class after Austin
Flint’s death he began : ^ ^ Since we met together on
Saturday, a veteran of the army of which you are recruits has
fallen ’ ; and a large part of the hour was given over to
a review of Flint’s services to the profession. In the course
of these remarks he said :

In the third place. Dr. Flint has done a great work in helping
us to arrive at more satisfactory therapeutical laws. In this he no
doubt followed the instructions of Jacob Bigelow of Harvard, to
whose teaching he probably listened, for he was the author of an
essay, one of the most classical in American medical literature, On
the Self-limitation of Disease/ He laid down there that a caidinal
principle in the consideration of the therapeutics of a disease was
a knowledge of its natural history ; that we had to know the course
of a malady left to nature before we could appreciate the action of
the medicines given for its cure. At the time that Dr. Flint graduated
who would have dared to treat a case of pneumonia from its beginning
to its termination without a drop of medicine? No one. The man
who would have attempted it would have been looked upon as in
the highest degree worthy of blame and censure, and certainly in
private practice would not have had the confidence of the family
for twenty-four hours.

In this way he chose to mirror in a self-analytical way his
own views of therapeutics, and one of the Blockley internes
of the day, Dr. Samuel McC. Hamill, writes that :

Osier’s rational use of drugs was much too far advanced for staid
Philadelphia. Can’t you imagine a naturally conservative city to
whom the eloquent Wood was extolling the value of drugs and the

^ ‘ Remarks to the Class in Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsyl-
vania.’ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ April 1886, xiv. 571.

268 University of Pennsylvania Spring 1886

equally* eloquent Pepper recommending a dozen different drugs in
the treatment of individual disease, shocked into insensibility by
having a young Professor of Medicine, recently come into their
midst, go through his wards with his internes and finding nothing
definite the matter with his patient say, ‘ Did we give that last
fellow Compound Tincture of Cinchona or Compound Tincture of
Gentian ? ’ . . , But in reality Osier was a very good therapeutist
as we internes realized, and used drugs not empirically but scientific-
ally, and in his teaching laid great stress upon the general manage-
ment of the disease. . • .

Late in March he delivered three lectures ^ on the
Cartwright Foundation, before the Alumni Association of
the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He
devoted these lectures to ^ certain problems in the physio-
logy of the blood’, a subject which was engrossing the
attention of many of the leaders of medicine at this time ;
and in them he incorporated the results of his own detailed
microscopic researches which, begun years before in Burdon
Sanderson’s laboratory, had continued through the Mont-
real period with the investigation of anaemia, and were
soon to merge into his malarial studies.

As April approached, his mother’s letters, which had been
telling of much sickness in a family whose third generation
was rapidly increasing in number, begin to express eagerness
for his home-coming after the winter term, for she sees
that his father is becoming more and more helpless. He
must have been April-fooling his nephew, for she wrote :

Poor little Billee was highly indignant at your Apl. ist
postal, but B. B. traced out some invisible sentences much
to the lad’s satisfaction and you were forgiven the insult.
We shall be counting the days now till we see you — stay as
long as possible when you come.’ He divided his Easter
recess between Toronto and Montreal, where a cousin was
to be married, and this festivity over, it appears that he

^ Medical Nezvs^ Phxla., 1886, xlviii. 365, 393, 421. His tkree main topics
were : (i) the blood platelets ; (2) the degeneration and regeneration of the
blood corpuscles ; and (3) the relation of the corpuscles to the processes of
coagulation. The lectures, which were copiously illustrated by original
drawings cut from his note-books, give an exact presentation of the existing
state of knowledge on topics to which he had made notable contributions,
but it IS necessary to read between the lines to determine the real significance
of his own personal observations and discoveries.

Aet 36 A Uoming-ot-age Farty 269

went to Perth on a Sunday to make a post-mortem examina-
tion on an old patient, a physician in whose case every one
had made a wrong diagnosis, and found to his amazement
a rare tumour at the base of the brain which he subsequently
reported.^ So almost everything he did became grist to
his literary mill.

The inaugural meeting of the Association of American
Physicians, which Osier in an article thirty years later
referred to as ^ the coming-of-age party of internal medicine
in America V was held in Washington on the 17th and l8th
of June.

Special societies [he writes] had already been successful, and
the idea was in the air, so to speak. The suggestion came, I believe,
from Dr. James E. Graham, of Toronto, to Dr. James Tyson. Pepper
was actively sympathetic and took a leading part in the organization
From the start it proved a great success. Francis Delafield, the first
President, struck the true note when he said : ‘We want an associa-
tion in which there will be no medical politics and no medical
ethics ; an association in which no one will care who are the officers,
and who are not ; in which he will not ask from which part of the
country a man came, but whether he has done good work, and will
do more ; whether he has something to say worth hearing, and can
say it.’ The leading clinicians and pathologists of the country were
present. One man whom we had all hoped to have with us, the
Nestor of clinical medicine in the country, Austin Flint, had recently
died, and some seniors who attended this meeting did not care to
join the Association. Meredith Clymer an old pupil of Andral and
Chomel, was an interesting link with the past. Looking over the
list, it is sad to see that only twenty-five of the original seventy-five
members survive. . . . The association set a standard, promoted good-
fellowship, encouraged research among the younger men, and has
led to the formation of many societies dealing with various aspects
of medicine and pathology. . . .

His own contribution to the programme of this first
meeting was a paper of minor interest dealing with a rare
condition of the valves of the heart, but there were many
other communications of more than ordinary importance :
by William H. Welch of the Johns Hopkins on ^ An Experi-

^ ‘A case of Cholesteatoma of Floor of Third Ventricle and of the
Infundibulum.’ Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, N.Y., 1887, xiv.

657-73

^ International Clinics, Phila., 1915, iv. i.

270 University of Pennsylvania June 1886

mental Study of Nephritis ’ ; by F. W. Draper on ‘ Pancreatic
Haemorrhage ’ ; by Reginald H. Fitz of Boston on ‘ Diseases
of the Appendix ’ ; by Weir Mitchell on ‘ Observations upon
the Knee Jerk for Westphal’s recent discovery was coming
to be looked upon as an important diagnostic sign in diseases
of the nervous system ; and particularly one by W. T.
Councilman from Welch’s laboratory on ‘ Certain Elements
Found in the Blood of Malarial Fever Thereby hangs a
story, illustrative of Osier’s methods of work.

During the year 1880, a French army surgeon, Alphonse
Laveran, while stationed in Algiers had discovered certain
pigmented bodies in the blood cells in cases of malaria, of
which a report was made before the Academy of Science
in Paris. Though promptly taken up by the Italians,^ in
America little attention had been paid to this discovery
previous to Councilman’s work in Welch’s laboratory in
Baltimore, where malaria at this time was rife. Possibly no
member of the association, not even Councilman, had had
an experience equal to that of Osier with microscopical
studies of the blood ; and consequently when Osier arose
and expressed scepticism, ‘ speaking in the fulness of his
ignorance ’, as he said later, regarding Laveran’s claims, not
all of which Councilman had been able to verify, his remarks
must have had considerable weight. Osier stated that he
had examined the blood of six cases, in three of which at
the time of the chUl he had seen the amoeboid bodies,
but he was inclined to believe they were nothing more
than vacuoles in the cells. Even Councilman was doubtful
as to whether they represented the cause or the effect of
malaria ; but Sternberg, who was present, warmly upheld
Laveran’s work and both he and Councilman pointed out
that if Osier had stained his preparations he would have
been convinced that he was dealing with actual organisms.

^ It is quite probable that the long delay in following up and verifying
Laveran’s discoveries was due to the claims by Swiss and Italian investigators
of the discovery of a baallus of malaria which proved, as Osier said, ‘ an
ignis jatuus which had led many astray ’. To arrive at the truth is a long and
tedious process, and it may be noted that at this time scepticism was being
expressed regarding Pasteur’s work on hydrophobia, and even the tubercle
bacillus was encountering formidable opposition, for many claimed that it
was merely a concomitant of the disease and not its cause.

Aet. 36 An Uncertainty of Interpretation 271

In the wards at Blockley, to which he now had official
access, there had been a good many patients with malaria
during the spring, and Osier had made full notes of the
cases whose blood he had had an opportunity of examining.
In the very first of them, on April 20th, he had unquestion-
ably seen and made drawings of the amoeboid stage of the
malarial parasites, though he was evidently uncertain as to
their interpretation.^ Immediately after the meeting he
returned to Philadelphia and set to work to satisfy himself
as to the truth of the matter. He must have spent count-
less hours over the microscope, for his note-book, which
is extant, contains observations on the blood of seventy
cases, with notations and frequent illustrations of what he
had observed. It was the beginning of his great interest
in malaria, but it was not until his studies were resumed in
the autumn that he became fully convinced of the truth of
Laveran’s claims regarding the protozoal origin of the
disease.

He had expected to get away early in July for his holiday
and had hopes of a trip to England, though of this he was
doubtful, for as he wrote to his sister : ‘ I may be too hard
up, but I should like to attend the British Association
Meeting in Dublin and keep up my connexion with English
friends.’ But his malaria studies kept him in sweltering
Philadelphia well on into the month despite appeals from
his mother, who in her birthday letter says that ‘ Toronto
is cool ’, that she is ‘ dotting off the days till the 21st ’, and
that awaiting him ‘ there are 14 or 15 children at the
Island, who are revelling in the water and escape drowning
wonderfully ! ’

With evident reluctance, particularly after his experience

^ His scepticism is a little difficult to understand, particularly as the
Medical 'News for January i6th contained an account of the researches by
Marchiafava and Celli, which had fully corroborated those of Laveran ; these
Roman investigators had even recorded an instance of the experimental
transmission of the disease in man Malaria was coming to be a topic of great
importance, and it was in the course of his celebrated address before the
British Medical Association on August nth of this year, at Brighton, that
John S. Billings stated in regard to the malaria-ridden regions of the
Southern States, that despite some few exceptions ‘ malaria and science
were antagonistic

In British Columbia

July-Oct 1886

272

with ^ Case xvii, July 14, 1886 ^ when he saw the plas-
media in abundance, Osier broke off his studies for a brief
visit home and a subsequent five weeks’ holiday in British
Columbia — his first prolonged vacation in many years.
This trip, a voyage of inspection, was made over what was
then called the Winnipeg Western Railway in company
with his brother Edmund and a group of men who were
financially interested in the future development of the great
country to the north and west. There is little record of
this outing ^ beyond some doggerel lines, written by
Mr. F. Faithfull Begg, one of the members of the party,
which describe ^ a man of pills, in medicine learned in
human ills ’, whose every vein ^ the milk of human kindness
fills It was probably an invigorating life in the open,
much of it passed in ^ bark canoes, with noble red-men for
their crews ’ ; and in an address written long afterwards
Osier drew upon his memory of the trip for the following
figure :

There are two great types of practitioners — the routinist and the
rationalist — neither common in the pure form. Into the clutches
of the demon routine the majority of us ultimately come. The mind,
like the body, falls only too readily into the rut of oft-repeated
experiences. One evening in the far North West, beneath the
shadows of the Rocky Mountains we camped beside a small lake
from which diverging in all directions were deep furrows, each one
as straight as an arrow, as far as the eye could reach. They were
the deep ruts or tracks which countless generations of buffalo had
worn in the prairie as they followed each other to and from the
water. In our minds, countless, oft-repeated experiences wear
similar ruts in which we find it easiest to travel, and out of which
many of us never dream of straying.^

The 1st of September found him back in Philadelphia
again interned at Blockley with his microscope, and a few

^ One incident which W. O. recorded in his ‘ Notes and Comments ’
(Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ Jan. 1888, xvi. 377 et seq.) was to the
effect that a Mr Fred. Brydges, who had ‘ kindly met their party at the
Portage to escort them over the Manitoba and North Western Road told
a remarkable story of a new-born infant which had fallen from a moving train
and survived. Evidently this story was disbelieved by his Montreal friends,
for it had an E. Y. D.-ish flavour.

2 ‘ The Importance of Post-graduate Study.’ Lancet, Lond., July 14,
1900, li. 73.

Aet. 37 The Germ of Laveran 273

days later there appeared a long editorial in the Medical
News on ‘ The Malarial Germ of Laveran He still was
hesitant, without further evidence, to accept the bodies he
had seen as the causal agent of the disease, despite their
constant presence in acute cases. Further confusion had
been recently added to the subject by a paper in Virchow’s
Archiv, which described the finding of a njicrococcus in the
blood of malaria patients, and Osier states that ‘ the most
rigid scrutiny should be exercised in accepting evidence,
and it is to be hoped that those who have the opportunities
and the necessary technical skill will soon place us in a
position to give an opinion upon the Plasmodium malariae
Both opportunity and technical skUl were his, and by the
end of the month one of the cases ‘ showed crescentic forms
distinct and abundant on several examinations It is
apparent from his sketches that he had seen and figured
Laveran’s flagellate forms ; and, no longer with any shadow
of doubt in his mind, on October 28th, before the Patho-
logicalSociety,hegavein detail the results ofhis observations,
which were subsequently published.^

Osier’s Baltimore students in later years, who became
accustomed to the tedious search for the malarial parasite
in all obscure fevers, can realize what an amount of time
the study of his seventy cases entailed, with its effort to
determine in each instance what relation the organisms in
their various stages bore to the recurrent paroxysms and
in what way they were influenced by medicines ; for it was
then largely new ground, and hourly examinations of the
blood were required. He gained the impression that the
pigmented bodies in the red corpuscles were more numerous
before than during the attack, and the examples which
he saw of ‘ the remarkable segmentation of the parasite
resulting in its rosette form ’ were in each instance observed
during a paroxysm. Perhaps the most interesting paragraphs
of this important paper, which put Osier in the first rank
of the investigators of malaria (with Laveran, Richard,

^ ^ The Haematozoa of Malaria.’ transactions of the Pathological Society
of Philadelphia, 1887, xiii. 255 ; also British Medical Journal, 1887, i. 556.
In this paper he makes a frank acknowledgement of his former incredulity
‘ that flagellate organisms should occur in the blood
2923 I T

Oct. 1886

274 The Shivering Ague

Marchiafava and Celli, Golgi and Councilman) were those
in which he discussed the nature of the parasites, a topic
of particular interest to him in view of his earlier studies on
the parasites he had seen in the blood of the frog. Haema-
tozoa had also been seen in fish, in rats, in birds ; and he
gave an account of Surra, a disease affecting the horses,
mules, and camels in India, which his friend Griffith Evans
had recently described in the London V eterinary Journal,
attributing it to a blood parasite.^ Osier regarded the
flagellate form as the adult condition of the malarial
plasmodium ; but it remained for one of the Johns Hopkins
students, W. G. MacCallum, while studying malaria in
birds, to first observe the conjugation of the organisms and
thus fully to explain their flagellate form.

It is somewhat difficult, in view of the present knowledge
of the full life cycle of the malarial parasite, to project
oneself back into the obscurities existing in the ’8o’s ; and
a full decade was to elapse before Ronald Ross in India
proved that the mosquito played the part of an intermediary
host in the transmission of the disease — a discovery which
has led to the practical extermination of malaria from
seriously infected regions like the Roman Campagna and the
Isthmus of Panama whence, indeed, one of the patients in
Osier’s series had come. To most people of that day, lay
and professional, the shivering ague was caused by a mysteri-
ous nocturnal ‘ miasm ’, and it took years to introduce into
the southern states, where the disease was pandemic, the
idea which Osier quickly grasped and adopted, ‘ that in
malarial regions the examination of the blood will prove in
skilled hands a most valuable aid in the diagnosis of many

^ In the copy of Evans’s ‘Report on “Surra” Disease’ (1885) in Osier’s
library, he has written : ‘ When I was a student with Bovell at Toronto,
1 868-9, Griffith Evans, who was stationed there as veterinary surgeon to the
Artillery, was much interested in the microscope and frequently came to
Bovell’s rooms to help in the preparation of specimens. He had previously
been stationed at Montreal, where he had graduated in medicine from McGill
in 1864. When serving in India he made the discovery of the parasites in the
blood in Surra — the first trypanosome disease to be described. On his
retirement he went to Bangor, where he still lives, a hale, hearty octogenarian.
He sent this, and a book of photographs of famine scenes in India, 8 Jan.,
1918.’

Aet. 37 Malaria and the Microscope 275

obscure cases A few years later in Hs Baltimore clinic
the regulation was put into effect that no diagnosis of
malaria be made without a microscopic demonstration of
the parasite. It was a most important matter, for nearly
every fever in the South at the time was loosely called
typho-malaria and treated with quinine.

Obviously he had become so deeply engrossed in his
clinical work, now centring itself more and more at Blockley,
that there were few occasions for abstraction when he
might be found scribbling James BovelBs name on his pad.
But he nevertheless had a moment of nostalgia at the thought
of the McGill opening session :

To F.J. Shepherd from W. 0 . 13 1 South 15th St. Phila.

I2th[0ct., 18S6].

How are you all ? It seems long since I have heard from any of
you. I felt very like skipping North on the ist, for your intro-
ductory lecture. I felt rather homesick. I still, at times, feel like
a stranger & a pilgrim though everyone is very kind and I have
got on better than I could have anticipated. I must arrange to spend
some days in Montreal at Xmas, and run up also to the Carnival if
you have one this Winter. Everything goes on here as usual. ^ My
hospital work at Blockley keeps me very busy as I have 80 patients
to look after. I am able however to do much more satisfactory ward
teaching than heretofore. Hays asked me the other day about
a note of yours in re Canada Med. Association & the Quebec pro-
fession. He thought it would rather stir up dust & I agreed with
him. , . .

It must have been about this time that he paid his first
visit to Baltimore, in view of the following letter postmarked
November 8, 1886, to his old friend Dr. John A. MuUin of
Hamilton. It is quite possible that he may have gone oyer
for the purpose of checking up his malaria observations with
the work which was in progress there :

Sunday.

Your most interesting specimens came to hand on Thursday &
I demonstrated them at 1 1 a.m. to the class as the typical lesions
of Addison’s disease. The caseo-fibrous changes are most marked
& there is very little normal tissue to be seen. Do send me a note
of the case. You should report it as cases are so rare, tho’ they
seem to come in runs as this is the fourth which has come under
my notice since May ist. . . . I would have acknowledged receipt
sooner but I have been 2 days in Baltimore seeing Johns Hopkins,

Nov “Dec. 1886

276 His Inkpot Career

& more than delighted. It is the nniv. of the future & when the
Med School is organized all others will be distanced in the country.
When you come down in May with Malloch we shall go on for a day
or two. Goodell was asking for you both. You made quite an
impression on him. I am over head & ears in work, among other
things studying the Malarial germ which seems a pretty constant
body. Kind regards to Mrs MuUin & to Malloch. So glad you
have sent the boy to Port Hope.

During all this year, despite his intensive pursuit of the
malarial parasite, there was no let-up in his ^ inkpot career
^ Both pen and brain got a deal of practice in Philadelphia
as he admitted in later years. Besides the Cartwright
Lectures and the six or eight more serious clinical and patho-
logical papers which were published, he had, as he expressed
it, ^ devilled for Pepper for his System of Medicine
writing in addition to my own sections, those of Janeway
on certain of the diseases of the heart.’ There were also
numerous contributions to the Pathological Society and
an endless succession of editorials, of notes, and of book
reviews for the Medical News} In addition to all this he
had been persuaded by Minis Hays to take over another
task in connexion with the rejuvenation of the American
^Journal of the Medical Sciences^ a journal founded in 1827
and so with one or two exceptions (the Edinburgh Medical
Journal^ 1803 ; the Lancet^ 1823) the oldest medical
periodical in the English language. Its book reviews were
to be made a special feature of the rejuvenated journal and
its January issue contained two of them from Osier’s pen,
one signed, the other not. The latter was a review of
Pepper’s ^ System ’, which pointed out ^ an extraordinary
mistake ’ by the author (W. O. himself) of the section on
^ Diseases of the Blood and Blood-glandular System ’ :
moreover, the review when submitted was signed ^ E. Y. D.’
but the editors saw fit to omit these initials.^

^ Forty-nine of the editorials during 1886 have been identified as his, and
there are probably many more, sometimes two or three appearing in a single
issue They were on a great variety of subjects.

2 Another feature of the journal in its new form was its ‘ Summary of the
Progress of Medical Science % and in the April issue Osier’s name appeared
in charge of the section devoted to Medicine. This he attempted to conduct
single-handed, though soon (October 1886) the names of J. P. Crozier GriflSith,

Aet. 37 A Centenary Celebration 277

1887

At the end of his Christmas holidays, spent as usual in
Toronto, he visited his friends at McGill, taking Palmer
Howard back with him to Philadelphia for the Centennial
Exercises of the College of Physicians held on January 3rd
in the old home of the College, at 1 3th and Locust Streets.
Ever since his advent in Philadelphia Osier had frequented
the College Library, which then boasted some 34,000
volumes. Indeed only a year had elapsed after his election
as Fellow on January 7, 1885, before he was put on the
Library Committee with Weir Mitchell, Minis Hays, and
F. P. Henry — an evidence of his great popularity, for, as
the present librarian testifies, such a thing has never
occurred before or since. He served on this committee
until he left for Baltimore ; and to the end of his fife
retained the liveliest interest in the affairs of the College,
to whose library a goodly number of its more precious books
were subsequently added under his auspices.^

So it is not surprising to find him. taking an active part
in the celebration of this year at which honorary fellowships
were conferred upon distinguished guests, among whom was
Palmer Howard. Indeed the occasion brought together an
assemblage of men who either were already reckoned among
Osier’s friends or who subsequently came to be — among
them Hunter McGuire of Richmond; Jacobi and Draper
of New York ; James Chadwick, George B. Shattuck, and
H. P. Bowditch of Boston ; Sternberg, Edes, and John S.

his assistant, of Walter Mendelsohn of New York, and subsequently of
W. S. Thayer and George Dock, appeared as his coadjutors.

^ His method is illustrated by the following incident related by Dr. Keen :
‘ No institution in Philadelphia was more cherished by him than the College
of Physicians and its splendid library. He was always giving notable books
to it. Even after he went to Oxford his benefactions did not cease. Once
he wrote to Mitchell that Quaritch had a superb copy — ^the best he had ever
seen except the famous Grolier copy in the British Museum — of the first
printed edition of Celsus (1478), beautifully bound, as became its author,
which could be had for ^80. He wanted the College to have it and wrote .
“ I’ll give $25. Can’t you bleed the Fellows for the rest,” Mitchell
promptly phlebotomized the other Fellows and the book now ornaments our
shelves ’ He also bequeathed to the College his finest manuscript, Bernard de
Gordon’s Lihum Medtcinae^ 1348.

278 University of Pennsylvania jan. 1887

Billings of Washington. But the central figure was Weir
Mitchell, who had been elected President of the College
for this its centennial year, and who gave in a charming
commemorative address ^ an historical account of the
growth and position of the profession in Philadelphia. This
entailed a medical genealogy of the College from the time
its thirteen founders — ‘ some in Quaker dress and some in
knee-breeches, most of them carrying the gold-headed cane
and the meditative snuffbox, some with queues or powdered
wigs ’ — who, probably dominated by Benjamin Rush, first
met in the little house on Fifth Street. And Osier, no less
interested than Mitchell in local history, subsequently drew
upon the same theme to say :

The College is local, and the property of a local organization, but
John Jones, Morgan, Shippen, Rush, Wistar, Dorsey, Dewees,
Barton, Chapman, Wood, Hodge, Meigs, Gross and many others
whose names we honour, belong now, not to Philadelphia alone, but
to the history of the profession of this country. The social force
and influence which physicians have always exercised in Philadelphia is
not a little peculiar, and there is much truth in the statement that ‘ he
is, and always has been, relatively a more broadly important personage
here than elsewhere’. Certainly, physicians have played a large part
in our public as well as private history, and they have ‘ sustained in
noble succession the prominence of this city in all that lifts our art
and its sister sciences above the common level of applied usefulness.

No one ever entered more whole-heartedly into making
a success of celebrations of this sort, but there was other
business of a more serious nature in hand, for with the
beginning of the year he had resumed his studies of malaria
with an attempt to differentiate the organisms of various
types of the disease — quotidian, tertian, and quartan,
anticipating the observations of Marchiafava and Celli
published two years later. He evidently sent his papers to
Laveran, who replied enthusiastically, saying : ‘ J’ai ete
pendant plusieurs annees tres embarrasse pour classer mes
parasites ; la place que vous leur assignez me parait leur
convenir tout k fait.’ Osier had written at this time
a general summary of the malaria question which appeared
in a March issue of the British Medical Journal, and from

Medical News, Phila., Jan 8, 1887, 1 . 29. In this same issue is Osier’s
editorial on the centennial, from which excerpts have been taken.

Aet. 37 Inseminating other Minds 279

now on his particular interests, so far as his publications
indicate, lay in the direction of utilizing the information
already gained, that is in differentiating cases of malaria
from other obscure febrile conditions, rather than in further
studies of the parasite.^ His writings more than those of
any other of his contemporaries served to stimulate interest
in malaria and to popularize throughout the profession the
knowledge necessary for its proper recognition, for it was
evident that the diagnosis could no longer remain merely
a matter of probability based on recurrent chills and an
^ ague cake \ but was capable of exactitude with the aid of
a microscope. Osier’s enthusiasm was contagious, and many
of his pupils and assistants got to work on the subject.
In this way he fathered some of the important subsequent
discoveries which were made in his Philadelphia and
Baltimore clinics. Nevertheless, as he subsequently ad-
mitted : ^ It was a long uphill battle ; most sceptical

myself at first, there were many of my colleagues at Phila-
delphia who could not be convinced, and my good friend
Dr. Payne of London, pathologist at St. Thomas’s, on the
appearance of my paper in the B. M. J. of 1887, wrote
confidentially urging me to be more careful in the future, as
what I had described and figured were evidently artefacts.’

By his own precept and example Osier stimulated his stu-
dents to observe, record, and publish. He had, as Clifford
Allbutt has said, that wonderful power, only possessed by
a few great teachers, of ^ inseminating other minds

Wherever he went [writes W, W. Keen] the wheels began to go
‘ round things began to be done, and all for the good of the pro-

^ This was not entirely so, however, for in the discussion of a second paper
by W. T. Councilman before the Philadelphia Pathological Society early
in the following year, Osier stated that he had made a series of observations
on the blood of fishes and birds, in view of the statement that some of the
forms described by Laveran had been found m the blood of carp and some
water-fowl. Professor Baird of Woods Hole had offered him facilities for
this work and had furnished him with forty-five carp in which he had
failed to detect organisms. Nevertheless, in the blood of a goose sent him
from Ontario by Dr. G. A MacCallum (father of his pupil W. G.) with the
statement that the bird had malaria, he had found one or two pigmented
bodies. They were not numerous, however, nor was the temperature elevated ;
nor, so far as could be made out, did the goose have chills. {Medical News,
Phila , Jan. 14, 1888, hi. 54)

28 o University of Pennsylvania SprmgiSSy

fession and of the community. The dry bones as in Ezekiel’s Vision
gathered themselves together and became imbued with active life.
The diligent were encouraged to become more diligent, the slothful
were shamed into activity. He was a fount of inspiration. His
personal influence extended more widely and to better purpose than
that of almost anyone I have ever known. Weir Mitchell and William
Pepper were of the same type, and when this powerful triumvirate
were gathered in Philadelphia they had no rival the country or
possibly the world over.

His method of ‘ insemination ’ took various forms, though
it was often merely a hint of a thing worth doing scribbled
to some one on a postcard. Dr. George de Schweinitz
treasures two brief notes, one of which spurred him to
write the text-book which has gradually ‘ swollen ’, as he
expresses it, through nine subsequent editions. On his
appointment as ophthalmic surgeon to Blockley, Osier
promptly sent (May yth) a few lines of congratulation,
saying : ‘ It will give you a splendid field (of vision).’ One
Sunday evening shortly after this he found Osier reading,
as was his custom, in the library of the Rittenhouse Club.
Merely a wave of the hand passed between them, but later
on when Osier got up to leave he tossed into de Schweinitz’s
lap a slip of paper on which was written the following : ‘ A
Manual of Ophthalmic Surgery for Students. By G. E. de
Schweinitz, &c. &c. &c. Phila. 1889. A suggestion —
Verb, saf^

Encouraged by the success of a series of reports on
rheumatism which he had sponsored and which the Medical
News had published the preceding year, he undertook at
this time two other therapeutic surveys : the first was on
‘ Pneumonia in the Philadelphia Hospitals in which
Pepper, Bartholow, Meigs, Tyson, Wilson, and he himself
participated. It is interesting to read Osier’s brief statement
that there were two groups of pneumonia patients — ‘ the
alcoholic and the temperate ; the majority of the former
die in spite of all treatment ; the majority of the latter get
well vvith any, or with no, treatment ’ — and to compare
this with the quinine, antimony, alcohol, and antipyretics,
to mention but a few of the drugs advocated by his con-
temporaries. This Philadelphia report was followed by
^ Medical News, Phila., Mar. 5, 1887, 1. 260.

Aet 37 Therapeutic Surveys 281

others from the leading physicians of the New York and
Boston hospitals, and these in turn by Osier’s editorial
summary in which it was pointed out that ^ pneumonia has
come to be known as a specific self-limited disease and the
only rational treatment is the expectant one ’ ; but he
concludes with this hopeful paragraph :

It may be, however, that to the generation which will follow, at
these same hospitals, the men whose practice we have given, the
symptomatic and expectant plan at present in vogue will appear as
crude and unscientific as does to us the active antiphlogistic treat-
ment, with venesection conp sur coup and antimony to repletion.^

Later in the year appeared another series of papers,
similarly sponsored, on ^ The Treatment of Typhoid in the
Philadelphia Hospitals in which the therapeutic fashion
in each of them was put on record. This in^turn was
followed by reports of the routine treatment employed in
the New York, Boston, and Montreal hospitals ; and in his
subsequent editorial, in which the main facts were assembled.
Osier said that the reports showed ^ a remarkable uniformity
of opinion, with hygiene, diet and nursing as the essentials ’
— a conclusion hardly justified by the evidence, it may be
added. ^ In laying before the profession these examples
of the inconsistency and fashion displayed in the use of
drugs, his purpose was accomplished. The profession could
draw its own conclusions and it was not necessary to rub the
lesson in. For his own part he became ere long a warm
advocate of Brand’s system of cold bathing in typhoid —
a revival of the Currie method of treating fevers. The
students and nurses of the early years of the Johns Hopkins
will vividly recall the laborious tubbings of these cases
which were then so common. To-day both tubs and typhoid
have wellnigh vanished, together with malaria and the
mosquito, thanks to the sanitary transformation of Balti-
more, in effecting which Osier’s voice, so often raised,
played no little part.

^ Osier’s unorthodox views on the treatment of pneumonia by no means
went unchallenged, for veratrum vinde and antimony continued to prevail,
as he confessed in ‘ Notes and Comments March 1888, Canada Medical and
Surgical Journal^ xvi, 508.

^ Medical NezvSy Phila., Dec. 10, 1887, p. 677 ; and Dec. 24, p. 739.

282 ‘ Notes and Comments ’ May 1887

The year passed much as the preceding one. He was
busily engaged in his clinical teaching, in laboratory studies,
attending meetings, and for ever writing. More busy than
ever with his pen, nevertheless he took on two additional
tasks, one of which was a series of ‘ Notes and Comments ’
which he sent to Ross for the Canada Medical and Surgical
Journal, to whose pages a few years before he had been such
a copious contributor. In these brief essays, consisting of
notes on ‘ practice, books and men ’, he let himself out to his
Canadian readers in a delightful, semi-serious, and philoso-
phical vein suggesting the literary style of his later essays.
The notes cover about four pages in almost every issue of
the journal for the next two years, the first instalment
beginning with a discussion of Pasteur’s work on rabies and
the violent attack to which he had been subjected in the
Paris Academy ; he then comments on the opposition to
Koch which ‘ seems rank heresy in these days of staining
fluids and cultures . . . even Dr. Bastian has not said any-
thing since the debate at the International Congress in
London.’ And he adds that though there are protests in
Germany and France, and a remnant still in this country
who stand out against the germ theory, ‘ the younger
generation of workers, to a man, have stained Angers ’.

In his ‘ Notes and Comments ’ for May he confessed that
‘ with the return of spring comes the annual worry of
examinations. It has never been my good fortune to be
connected with an institution which relieved the teachers
of the responsibility of examining the students they have
taught. I suppose such a duty should not be a worry, but
it is in certain ways, particularly if one has both a heart and
a conscience.’ His clinical assistant at the time, Dr. Crozier
Griffith, recalls telling him one day that the boys were
very much afraid of his approaching examination, and he
replied : ‘ I mean them to be ; I am examining in the
interest of the public, not of the students.’ But this, one
fears, was an idle threat, for he could never bring himself to
‘ pluck ’ students whom he had come to know and be fond
of, however much he might talk in the open about high
standards and rigid tests. The combat which he waged
within himself over these matters, for he was continually

Aet. 37 Examining Medical Students 283

protesting and writing on the subject, is both tragic and
amusing, and after his transfer to England his personal
feeling that it was an examiner’s duty to dwell upon the
student’s character and his method of attacking the problem
at hand rather than on the number of facts he could retain
in his mind, continually ran counter to the prevailing
custom ; but his criticisms of English Examinations must
be deferred to later chapters. Between the lines of
this note to Ross’s journal the confession of his own weak-
ness stands exposed, for he says : ‘To reject a man in his
final examination is no light matter. In every Faculty
there are one or two members so kind-hearted that they
cannot pluck a candidate. Sympathy for the man excludes
all sense of justice.’ And yet in the next breath he adds :
‘ A lively sense of responsibility to the public admits of no
such sentiment, and if there is an occasion which demands
strictness and firmness, it is when we are asked to decide
whether or not a man is fit to take charge of the lives of his
fellow-creatures.’

A few of Osier’s letters of this period have been recovered ;
and though they hardly deserve this designation they are
characteristic of his laconic brevity in correspondence.
Being mostly on postcards their chronology can be estab-
lished, for he rarely took time for such superscriptions as
full dates ; ‘ i8th ’ or ‘ Tuesday ’ or perhaps even ‘ Oct.’
would satisfy him ; his i’s and t’s and punctuation suffered
from equal neglect ; and for conjunctions he resorted to
a peculiar symbol of his own representing an ampersand.
But then, many a budding correspondence has been
blighted by too much attention to these details, as well as
by the search for envelopes and the folding, licking, and
stamping to which a postcard rises superior. The notes —
and there are many more of the same kind — were to his
friend and colleague, J. H. Musser : ^

Musser and Ogden seem to have been the only ones who preserved their
brief messages from Osier during the ’8o’s It is for this reason that their
names appear to dominate his correspondence, though the notes quoted are
merely examples of countless ones he must have showered upon other people
as well. His postcard habit was doubtless established partly for reasons of
economy, partly for convenience, and stamped correspondence cards on which
he could quickly scribble a note were always at hand on his desk.

284 University of Pennsylvania May 1887

[May 13, 1887.]

Dear M I never thought of it & then we had sat down when
you came in I am glad you didnt order anything else Docks
address would be Frankfurt on Main care of Prof Weigert I do not
see his letter I fear it went into the W P B I see it is Bruce you
ask after he is at the Lafayette Bruen is still south somewhere
Yours W. O.

Saturday a m [May 23, 1887],

Dear Musser I wrote out the cheque yesterday a m & was
interrupted & forgot to tear it ofi W. O.

29th [May, 1887].

I have just had a note from one of my nephews stating that he
was coming to Phila. for his holiday on the 7th As I asked him to
come & as his vacation is a fixed time I cannot disappoint the young
codger by slipping away wh means I shall not see C. this year>
I am very sorry as I feel the honour On your broad shoulders the
burden will rest Yours W. O.

The two first notes relate undoubtedly to the equipment
for a small clinical laboratory. He and Musser had agreed to
contribute $50 each for the purpose, and. Dr. George Dock,
who since his graduation had been working as a volunteer
in the Dispensary with Musser, was to be put in charge.
It is difficult, to-day, to realize that up to this time, far from
there being a laboratory, there was no microscope, except
Osier’s, in use in the University Hospital. To be sure,
Dr. Fussell, a classmate of Dock’s, had been taught to make
microscopic examinations of sputum, but up to this time
clinical microscopy in the hospital may be regarded as
a thing unknown. In all this Pepper had very little interest,
though he would occasionally send a specimen to the
laboratory before one of his clinics, so that he might mention
the findings. To these clinics his colleague, Osier, as a
friendly critic, occasionally used to go, but Pepper’s wa^not
his method. Osier was particularly prone, in teaching, to
draw lessons from his own diagnostic mistakes. Pepper was
known on occasion to give a brilliant discourse to the
students on Addison’s disease, using a patient with ordinary

^ ‘ CJ refers to Chicago, where the American Medical Association met the
following month. The note suggests that an olive branch had been held out.
Musser from the first was an enthusiastic worker in the A. M. A. and became
its President.

Aet. 37

A New Opportunity 285

jaundice for the purpose of the clinic, knowing full well it
was a deception. The two men, in fact, were the antipodes
of each other, and a community in which Pepper held sway
could not possibly hold Osier long. There was never any-
thing, however, in the nature of a misunderstanding between
them. As will be seen, Osier had the greatest admiration
for many of Pepper’s qualities, but it is easily understood
why Osier spent so much of his time at work in other
hospitals, for the material at the University Hospital at
this time was limited and so was the spirit.

His April ‘ Notes and Comments ’ wound up with an
announcement of the opening of a new building of the
‘ Orthopedic Hospital ‘ probably the most completely
equipped special hospital in the country ’. At this institu-
tion Weir Mitchell was one of the attendants, and becoming
aware, in the course of their intimacy, of Osier’s great
interest in the diseases of the nervous system, he was
instrumental in securing an appointment for his friend.
This new obligation Osier took up with his usual enthusiasm,
and his first papers published from the Hospital ^ represented
a series of lectures which were based on an elaborate
statistical investigation of the cases of chorea which had
been in the clinic during the preceding decade, 410 in all.
Of these, 1 10 were traced and were submitted to a thorough
examination, from which he drew the conclusion that there
is no known disease in which endocarditis is so constantly
found.®

The afternoon clinics for nervous diseases between the
hours of one and four- thirty were divided between Wharton
Sinkler, Weir Mitchell, and himself, and he was also associ-

^ The Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous
Diseases.

2 Medical News, Phila., Oct. 15, 1887, li. 437, and 465. American Journal
of the Medical Sciences, Oct. 1887, xciv. 371.

^ During the course of these studies he became interested in hereditary
‘ chorea first described by Dr. George Huntington as occurring m families
living on the eastern end of Long Island. A long correspondence followed
with Dr. Huntington and Dr. Osborn of Easthampton, where Osier planned
to make a visit the summer of this year, but was dissuaded owing to the
sensitiveness of the afflicted people in regard to their malady. He speaks of
this in an ‘ Historical Note on Hereditary Chorea ’ published in 1908 in
‘ The Huntington Number ’ of N eurographs, a series of neurological studies.

286 University of Pennsylvania Summer 1887

ated at the hospital with Keen, Morton, Goodman, Hunt,
Agnew, and Morehouse, between all of whom an unusual
degree of professional friendship was established. This
highly desirable position was time-consuming, but Osier’s
calendar was like india-rubber and could be thus stretched
without apparent loss of time for other things, and mean-
while a series of important articles representing researches
in his more special field continued to appear.’- One of them,
on ‘ Duodenal Ulcer ’, deserves mention, for it was written
when this lesion, now so commonly recognized and operated
upon, was regarded as rare, yet he opens his paper ^ with
the statement that ‘ the solitary ulcer occurs more fre-
quently in the duodenum than in any other portion of the
intestine, and in its etiology and morbid anatomy is almost
identical with the gastric ulcer ’. Many years elapsed before
the truth of this statement came to be fully appreciated.
Another paper was on ‘ Irritable Heart in Civil Life ’, which
he read before the Toronto Medical Society on April 14th,
when at home for his Easter holiday — a topic which the
recent war has brought into prominence, though it was
scarcely heard of in the ’8o’s. StiU another was on ‘ Throm-
bosis of the Portal Vein ’ ; and on June 2nd, when the
Association of American Physicians met for the second time
in Washington, an entire evening session was given over
to the subject of ‘ Haemorrhagic Infarction ’, Welch
covering the pathological and experimental side and Osier
its clinical aspects.

His April holiday in Toronto must have been brief, for
his mother wrote to Mrs. Gwyn : ‘ Willie’s meteor-like
■visit was pleasant while it lasted, he left at noon yesterday —
he is lamentably thin, I do wish he had a nice wife to attend
to little home comforts for him — he hopes to be home again
on the 9th of July and spend an idle time which will be
good for mind and body.’ With the exception of a visit
to the Shepherds at Como and the Howards at Cacouna,

^ His bibliography contains an amazing number of titles for the year,
eighty in all, if his minor reports and editorials are included. This would
suggest superficiality were it not realized that his remarks at the society
meetings he regularly attended were invariably reported.

® Canada Medical and Surgical Journal, March 1887, xv. 449.

Aet. 38 A Move to new Quarters 287

July and August — ‘ the idle time ’ — were passed largely in
Toronto getting his chorea lectures ready for publication.
One of them was given August 31st before the Canadian
Association in Hamilton, and from there he must have
gone on to Washington for the International Congress
which opened September 5th. If he did so, he was one of
very few of the original (superseded) committee who could
bring themselves to attend. As he intimates, there were few
foreign guests, and those without special distinction. The
reception at the White House given by President and
Mrs. Cleveland was a ‘ crush ’, and almost the only redeeming
feature of the week was the uniformly good weather. It is
well to draw a curtain over the IXth International Medical
Congress.

To H. V. Ogden from W. O. \ca. Sept. 15].

I have had a quiet summer at home — have not seen so much of
my relatives for years. My father is pretty shaky. I was very uneasy
about him during the hot weather. Mrs. F. and her tribe are well.
May has grown a fine girl & the boys are all thriving. I dare say
Mrs F. will send you some recent photos. Very sorry to have missed
your sisters, I did not go in tho I should have liked very much to
see your grandmother. Very few English or Germans at the Congress.
Some of the sections were good, others shocking. Glad to hear that
you have been busy. I am sure you will capture the town in time.
I saw Rogers in Toronto — ^larger than ever, but unchanged — ^My
love to poor old Cantlie when you see him. I have been working at
Chorea. Paper on Heart relations in Am. Jr. October & lectures
will appear in early No’s of the News. When are you coming on ?
Take a holiday about Xmas. I am moving to nicer quarters [1502
Walnut St.] near by. Wish indeed we could get Senn here. His
stock is away up in the East. He will get a call before long. It
would be a mistake for him to go to Rush.

The new quarters, in which he was to live for little more
than a year, were far pleasanter than those at his old address,
where as a matter of fact from morning till night he was
rarely seen, though there are recollections of occasional
Saturday afternoon tea-parties held there for the special
children of his special friends with games and cakes — he the
youngest of all. The new house, which had been Stille’s,
an old, narrow, three-story residence of the familiar city
type, stood on Walnut near the .corner of 15th Street, and

208 University of Pennsylvania Sept. 1887

in it Osier had the same sort of unadorned office as his
previous one, lined with books and strewn with manuscript.
He had merely rented the place and had a housekeeper, and
though his brother from Toronto, who soon visited him,
having an eye for the advance in real-estate values, urged
him to purchase the property on a loan, he did not wish to
encumber himself with debt. In debt he never was, in
spite of the frequent cobwebs in his pockets. But how could
pockets be otherwise when their wearer did not wait for
change to be put in them ? His familiar formula when he
bought a paper from a newsboy was : ‘ Keep the change,
sonny ; you’re raising a large family and I’m not.’

Consistent with his Montreal programme, he had been
responsible for getting a group of men to combine in
subscribing for foreign publications, chiefly in French and
German, which in all probability he utilized more fully
than any member of this ‘ club ’. These journals were
doubtless the source of many of his editorials, which, on
a great variety of subjects, continued to appear in the
Medical News. One of them mentions the operation on
the throat of the German Crown Prince, the progress of
whose malady filled the medical journals during the year ;
and had the outcome of Morell Mackenzie’s treatment been
more successful and the Emperor Frederick lived — weU,
there might have been no Great War in 1914. In another
place he happened to mention that pestiferous telephones
were beginning to be put in doctors’ offices, ‘ for their
convenience ! ’ It was an instrument he abhorred. Indeed
he was somewhat slow in adopting time-saving devices —
not even having a fountain pen in those days before medical
secretaries ; and no one remembers ever having seen him
using a carriage.

With all this incessant literary labour, there is not much
to be recorded in the way of relaxation. Stevenson’s
‘ Underwoods ’ was published this year and a quotation in
a letter to Ross gives a clue to his ‘ bedside ’ literature at
this time. Then the foUovdng memorandum, written down
on the evening of Dec. 9, may serve to recall his dinner clubs :

I have just walked home with Weir Mitchell from the Biological
Club at Wm. Sellers’ and he told me on the way of his discovery,

Aet. 38 Weir MitchelFs Rest Treatment 289

if one may so call it, of the rest treatment. About 12-14 ago
a Mrs S. from Bangor Maine came to consult him at the advice of
a mutual friend. She was a bright intelligent woman who had as
a girl attended in Boston a school in which Agassiz and his wife were
interested and had passed through the four years’ curriculum in
three years. She then had married and within as short a time as
was possible had had four children with the result of a total break-
down, body and mind. Boston and New York physicians were tried
for a year ; then she went abroad and in London and Paris saw the
most eminent consultants and spent months at various spas. But
in vain ; she returned a confirmed invalid . . . full of whims and
fancies. Standing at the foot of her bed, M. felt that every suggestion
he had to make as to treatment had been forestalled. Every physician
had urged her to take exercise, to keep on her feet, to get about,
and she felt herself that this was the best. M. on the inspiration
of the moment told her to remain in bed. [There follows a long
recital of the successful devices Mitchell resorted to leading to
recovery and to the patient’s return home.] The improvement
persisted ; she has since borne several more children and has been
the soul of many enterprises in her native town. An incident, post-
partum so to speak, was a letter from Mrs. S.’s mother a wealthy
New England woman, a speaker at temperance meetings, full of
’isms, &c. She wrote to Dr. M to say that bodily comfort and
ease, health and enjoyment might be dearly bought if at the price
of eternal peace. For he had recommended her daughter to take
champagne and to have a maid to assist her in her toilette. The
former she considered not only unnecessary but hurtful, the latter
quite superfluous, as any well-instructed New England husband was
quite capable of helping his wife in her toilette. W. O.

1888

Residential Philadelphia is not a place of mighty dis-
tances, and most of Osier’s chief friends were near at hand ;
but without a carriage daily visits at the University Hospital,
the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases, Blockley, and the late
afternoon at the College of Physicians, meant considerable
gadding even for one with such an active step as his. It is
difficult to understand how he found time to read and where
he did all his writing, but he knew how to capture the
moment, and his deaf adder ’ training at Weston had
brought powers of concentration which were serving him
well. Never annoyed by interruptions, ready to give freely
of his time to another, he was invariably blithe and gay,

u

2923.1

290 University of Pennsylvania Spring 1888

apparently the most care-free of mortals. A contemporary
Toronto letter says : ‘ Dr. Osier was here last week for
a consultation on Mrs. X, so we saw him for two days. He is
the same old sixpence and is writing papers on the Nervous
Diseases of Children and so has children on the brain.
He dances along the street singing as he goes — as of old.’

In his service at the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases
(Orthopedic Hospital) as elsewhere he gave of his best, and
as he gave so he received. With devoted colleagues and
surrounded by a group of enthusiastic juniors, despite his
short term of office he left such an unforgettable impression
on the place that those who survive his time, even down to
the humblest charwoman, recall him almost with tears of
pleasure. Very much the same feeling existed for him at
Blockley, and for his part he retained an unforgetting
memory of those who had shared his labours. ‘ I had the
best and kindest of colleagues,’ he wrote in after years to
J. W. Croskey, one of his juniors : ‘ Tyson, Bruen, Musser,
Hughes and others. With peculiar pleasure too I look back
on my association with a group of keen and intelligent
Residents, and with Miss Fisher and Miss Horner, in the
recently established training-school for nurses ; nor must
I forget dear old Owens, on the medical floor, with his
Hippocratic gift of prognosis.’ One of Osier’s characteristics
not to be lost sight of was that of getting up complimentary
dinners for people on suitable anniversaries, of suggesting
a portrait, of subscribing towards a gift for a servant as in
the case of this same celebrated Owens, the male ‘ head
nurse ’ who for thirty years lived in Blockley and died there.
So one may understand brief notes like this to his colleague
Musser :

Dear M — Sorry to have overlooked this — I will ask Pepper to move
that the Hosp. or the Faculty stand the expense & you will then be
re-imbursed— How much shall we need for Owens? Better consult
Wilson & Bruen — I wouldnt ask Henry— He does not know him &
has not yet been on duty — Yours W. O.

So it was he, rather than some Philadelphian of longer
standing, who is found on a committee with James Tyson,
J. William White and a student representative of each class.

Aet. 38 The Cerebral Palsies of Children 291

preparing to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of D. Hayes
Agnew’s graduation in medicine — a form of jubilee much
more common in continental than American faculties.
Agnew, then nearing the end of his indefatigable career,
was a surgical colleague not only at Blockley and the
Orthopedic Hospital but also held a chair at the University,
and well deserved the sort of tribute Osier had seen paid to
Frerichs and Rokitansky and others during his sojourn in
Europe.

1502 Walnut St., Philadelphia,
4/18/88.

Dear Ogden, You must stay a few days on your way to N.Y.
I shall have much more of interest to show you than on your last
visit. I am very busy at the cerebral palsies of children, working
up the Infirmary material. Shall give three lectures this spring.
Gowers has rather got ahead of me in his chapters which are the
only ones of importance in the language. Curious that the subject
should have been so much neglected. I am writing also on epilepsy,
chorea & the spastic palsies for K ^ Will you not report those cases
of Polio-encephalitis ? I wish you would send your comm, to one
of our journals. It helps you & them. Mrs F. & chicks all well.
I shall spend the summer quietly at home. Let me know when to
expect you.

Though Gowers had rather got ahead of him ’ ^ he
persisted in the preparation of the ^ three lectures ’ — there
were really five — based on an analysis of 151 cases of cerebral
palsy, from his own, MitchelPs, and Sinkler’s clinics.^ Their

^ John M. Keating, his colleague at Blockley, who was editor of an
Encyclopaedia for the Diseases of Children, in which many participated
Vol. i, 1889, Lippincott.

^ In a review (sent to Ross’s journal) of Gowers’s celebrated text-book
which had just appeared. Osier said that the volume had placed ‘ the author
at a comparatively early age among the highest living authorities on all
matters relating to the nervous system. No school of medicine in Great
Britain has produced such good work in this department as University
College : Bastian in the higher psychological relations of mind and brain,
Schafer in cerebral localization, Gowers in his numerous monographs and m
this large volume, and Horsley in his brilliant work in the field of brain
surgery.’

® The lectures were delivered during the spring session in the Infirmary
for Nervous Diseases ; were published in due course in the Medical News,
and finally gathered the following year into a volume dedicated to S. Weir
Mitchell.

292 University of Pennsylvania Spring 1888

final publication a year later, a timely and important one,
placed him high in the ranks of American neurologists,
already so eminently represented in Philadelphia in the
persons of Weir Mitchell and Charles K. Mills. Theirs was
a specialty just coming to the fore, with a society to foster
it of which Osier soon wrote to Ogden, saying :

. . . Would you not come on in Sept, to the Meeting of the
Assoc, of Am. Phy. in Washington. The neurological Soc. will also
meet there & others. Why not prepare a short report of a case
for the latter and come up for membership. I would get Mills to
propose you. They are anxious for new men from all parts of the
country. I will send on the reports of the Nurses Directory. Do
write up those polro-encephalitrs cases. Let me know when you
are comrng. Try to arrange about the Washington meeting. It wrll
be a very good one.

During the spring, plans were on foot for the first com-
bined meeting in Washington of the several special societies
to which this note refers. It was the first ‘ Congress of
American Physicians and Surgeons over which Billings
was to preside. The Surgeon-General’s Library at this
time was nearing completion, and Osier and Billings had
many common tastes and interests which had drawn them
together. This was not the only shadow of a coming event
which was cast at the time, though Osier was probably too
engrossed in his work to notice that it fell upon him.
Dr. Welch had just given his remarkable series of Cartwright
Lectures on ‘ Fever ’, of which Osier’s editorial review
concludes with the statement that it is gratifying ‘ to have
so able and comprehensive a study from a member of the
Johns Hopkins University, an institution the medical
department of which may, we trust, give a stimulus to
advanced study in medicine and surgery in this country,
such as the sister faculties have already given to literature,
history and science.’

Still another event of this spring has a bearing on the
Johns Hopkins. For one trained as a physician. Osier
had always shown not only an unusual grasp of the
problems confronting the surgeon but an unusually keen
perception of surgical abiHty, which he was quick to use
when occasion demanded. His attention had been particu-

A-et. 38

The Kensington Colt 293

larly drawn to the originality of a recent university graduate
whose name was beginning to appear in the journals, and
who was at work in a hospital in Kensington :

3 / 7/88

Dear Musser, Dont fail to be at the Staff meeting on Saturday
& vote for Kelly in poor Goodell’s place. J. William White & others
are running Davis and the staff must show its hand strongly by
placing Kelly at the top of the list of candidates. D. can wait, he
has only been here 14 mos, Sc is not to be named with Kelly. Yours

w. o.

One version of this episode in Osier’s own words ^ is as
follows :

The circumstances were these : Goodell had resigned, and there
was no end of discussion as to who should take his place. On several
occasions I had gone to Kensington to see Kelly operate, and I
happened to mention to Pepper that I had never seen anybody do
abdominal work with the same skill. He knew of Kelly, but had not,
I believe, seen him operate, which he immediately arranged to do.
Then one evening at the Biological Club, Horatio Wood and Mitchell
were discussing Goodell’s successor, and I said that Pepper and
I were backing a dark horse — a Kensington colt. With that, Leidy
chipped in with a remark that if it was young Howard Kelly, his
former prosector, he would back him heartily. This is how I remem-
ber the story.

Early in June the eldest of the Francis children, to Osier’s
great distress, had died after a long illness, and a few days
later he sent this note to Ogden, which is characteristic in
the way it drops the sad topic for matters relating to the
day’s work :

Dear O, Yes, Grant had typhoid with secondary meningitis.
I did not go up. Graham did not think it necessary as he seemed
doomed from the outset, with most profound cerebral symptoms.
It is very sad for them, & the poor fellow was doing very well & had
such good prospects.

That case will do splendidly for the thesis. I am reporting one of
spinal syphilis. We shall have a good meeting. I am busy at my
cerebral palsies of children lectures. They will come out m 7, 14
& 21 of July in News. I have collected a large amount of material
at our Infirmary Sc at the Penn. Inst, for feebleminded children.
Shall be so glad to see you in Sept. Send on those encephalitis cases.

^ Cf. the memorial sketch of Wilham Pepper in ‘ The Alabama Student
and other Essays 1908.

294 University of Pennsylvania June isss

In the subject of Death in the abstract Osier always had
the deepest philosophical interest, and a large section of his
library was given over to a diverse selection of works on the
subject- Shortly before this time, after first reading MunFs
^ Euthanasia he had written for Ross’s journal the following
forerunner of his Ingersoll Lecture :

We speak of death as the King of Terrors, yet how rarely does the
act of dying appear to be painful, how rarely do we witness agony
in the last hours. Strict, indeed, is the fell sergeant in his arrest,
but few feel the iron grip ; the hard process of nature’s law is for most
of us mercifully effected, and death, like birth, is ‘ but a sleep and
a forgetting.’

I have been much interested recently in the case of a friend
who had entered far into the Valley, and who now, in his con-
valescence, bitterly contrasts the pains and tortures of suppurating
hypodermic punctures with the dream-like, delicious sensations of
the profound collapse in which he nearly passed away. Shelley’s
description, [Mild is the slow necessity of death] is truer in
the majority of cases than Newman’s marvellous picture in ‘ The
Dream of Gerontius ’ of the act of dissolution, which, more in
accord with popular belief, is described as a ^ fierce and restless
fight ’, ‘a strange innermost abandonment ’, and sense of ruin,
worse than pain.

Dr. William Munk, the accomplished historian of the Royal
College of Physicians of London, has recently written a little work
on ‘ Euthanasia : or Mental Treatment in Aid of an Easy Death ’.
With much of general and scientific interest, it contains also many
valuable suggestions to practitioners and sound advice as to the
medical management of the dying. The first chapter, ‘ On Some
of the Phenomena of Dying ’, is full of interesting testimony on the
painlessness of death. He quotes William Hunter’s words, almost
his last ones : ^ If I had strength enough to hold a pen I would
write how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die.’ Dr. Munk urges
the free but judicious administration of opium, not so much for the
allaying of pain as for the relief of the feeling of exhaustion and
sinking — of indescribable distress and anxiety — referred to the
heart and stomach. Hufeland declared that opium ‘ is not only
capable of taking away the pangs of death, but it imparts even
courage and energy for dying.’ ^

But when death touched him personally, though he
suffered deeply he never permitted others to see within,
and as in his note to Ogden so even later on in the loss of his

^ Canada Medical and Surgical Journal^ March 1888, xvi. 51 1.

Aet. 38

Death and Euthanasia

^95

own child, he brushed his sorrow and its emotions aside
with some remark which to the unknowing might have
seemed almost flippant : ^ And if I laugh at any mortal
thing, ’tis that I may not weep/ In his account-book of the
year there is a brief and unfinished entry which permits one
to understand Osier more than had it been completed. It
reads: ‘June 3, 12.15 1888. I have just left the

death-bed of Miss Fisher — a sweet blessed character whose

influence upon me and upon others has been great in ’

This was all, but a few days later he wrote for the Medical
News^ to say :

The public of Philadelphia has sustained a severe loss in the death
of Miss Alice Fisher, who nearly four years ago was appointed hy the
Board of Guardians to take charge of the Training School for Nurses
at the Philadelphia Hospital. Only those familiar with the inner
history of that institution can appreciate the changes which have
been effected under her judicious direction. The good work which
she has accomplished has stimulated other hospitals of the city, and
training-schools have been established at the Pennsylvania, Episcopal,
and University Hospitals. By no means the least important lesson
of Miss Fisher’s too brief life in this community has been the demon-
stration of the fact that the profession of nursing affords an ample
as well as a most suitable field for women of the highest culture
and intelligence.

By the end of June his mother had begun to show im-
patience for his return : ^ We** are like school-children

counting the days to your holiday — ^within a week we hope
you will be with us.’ He seems to have remained in Toronto
through July, putting the final touches on his five lectures
which appeared in successive numbers of the Medtcal News ;
and there evidently followed a brief sojourn with his McGill
friends at Como and Cacouna, for she wrote on August 7th :
^ The house has been cruelly dull all the week. We sadly
miss your chirpy voice coming in and out one day after
another.’ While in Montreal he must have encountered
Dr. Egerton Y. Davis, for according to a note in Ross’s
journal that fabulous person is said to have paid a flying
call the same week and to have announced that ^ before
returning to Pentonville it is his intention to revisit the
Great Slave Lake in order to study further the remarkable
customs of certain Indian tribes frequenting that region ’,

296 University of Pennsylvania Sept. 1888

So after a romp with, the' Francis children at Toronto
Island, a visit with his kinsfolk in Dundas, an address on
‘ The Mortality in Pneumonia ’ given in Hamilton the last
day of the month, before the Canadian Medical Association,
September 3rd found him once more in Philadelphia show-
ing hospitality to people on their way to the Washington
Congress.

This gathering was to have more of the aspect of an
International Congress than the official one which had been
so badly staged the year before. Among the distinguished
foreign guests were William Ord, Pye-Smith, David Ferrier,
Victor Horsley, Sir William MacCormac, Sir Spencer
Wells, all of London ; Thomas Annandale of Edinburgh,
and von Esmarch of Kiel. It was the first of the notable
triennial meetings, subsequently held, of the various special
associations, for it was the beginning of the era of specialties
and though called a ‘ Congress of Physicians and Surgeons ’,
it was a conjoint meeting whose object, as Pepper, speaking
for the Executive Committee, stated in his introductory
remarks, was to bring together the active workers in allied
fields, which in no way conflicted with the objects and
purposes of the American Medical Association. John S.
Billings, as President and the central figure of the congress,
gave a notable address on medical museums with special
reference to the Army Medical Museum, where a large
reception was given in the building recently erected to
house not only this collection but the Surgeon-General’s
Library as well.

But Billings, as the medical adviser of the Johns Hopkins
Trustees, had another piece of business on his hands, and
during the congress was seen so often in Osier’s company ^
that suspicions of his motives were aroused. It is related
that Provost Pepper, knotving how intimate Osier was with
the Grosses, went in one morning to see S. W. Gross, and
standing with his back before the fireplace, said abruptly :
‘ We are likely to lose Osier, and what in the world shall we

1 In his ‘ Life of John Shaw Billings ’ F. H Garrison says : ‘ That Billings
should have chosen Osier, a character so utterly different from his cool,
impersonal self, is an index of his rare knowledge of men and his capacity to
appreciate traits which lay outside his own personality.’

Aet. 39 An Abrupt Proposal 297

do ? Billings is browsing around all the time and I am sure
something is up.’ To this Gross replied : ^ Well, Pepper, if
the position at the Johns Hopkins is offered him what have
we got in Philadelphia to compete with it ? ’ This story
is hardly in accord with Osier’s own brief account of the
matter, which would make Billings’s advances much more
abrupt, but inasmuch as Osier makes a mistake in his date,
likely enough he may have been similarly inaccurate in other
details. His account occurs in an obituary notice of Billings
written in 1913 :

An important interview I had with him illustrates the man and
his methods. Early in the spring of 1889 he came to my rooms,
Walnut Street, Philadelphia. We had heard a great deal about the
Johns Hopkins Hospital, and knowing that he was virtually in charge,
it at once flashed across my mind that he had come in connection
with it. Without sitting down, he asked me abruptly : ‘ Will you
take charge of the Medical Department of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital ? ’ Without a moment’s hesitation I answered : ^ Yes.’

‘ See Welch about the details ; we are to open very soon. I am
very busy to-day, good morning,’ and he was off, having been in my
room not more than a couple of minutes.

In his desire to illustrate Billings’s abrupt business
methods Osier may have used some literary licence, and
whether this interview actually occurred in this way, and
if so just when it occurred, is not certain. The date may
be approximately fixed as just before or just after the action
of the Johns Hopkins Trustees appointing Osier Physician-
in-Chief to the hospital, which according to the minutes
of their meetings was taken on September 25 th.^

The tail-enders of the Congress — the Horsleys, Ferrier,
Sir William MacCormac, the von Esmarchs and others, had
lingered in Philadelphia, together with his friends the
Shepherds of Montreal, according to the following note in

^ That there had been other preliminaries is indicated by this note from
Dr. Welch : ‘ I met Osier he says, ‘ at a dinner which Seguin gave him at
Delmomco’s in New York not long after my first return from Europe. He
was then in Montreal. I was captivated, and I think that he was my choice
for the Hopkins from the time I first became connected with it. In 1888 at
a meeting of the Association of American Physicians in Washington I was
practically assured that if he got the offer he would come to us. Billings up
to that time had Lauder Brunton, and a German professor who had been at
the German Hospital in London, in mind for the Chair of Medicine.’

298 University of Pennsylvania Oct. 1888

which he makes no reference to the Hopkins appointment,
evidently wishing to have his family notified first :

T 0 Mrs, F, 7. Shepherd from W. 0 . Oct. ist.

I hope you have recovered from your Phila. dissipations. I enter
to-day upon a sober life again. My last friend, Dr. Goltdammer of
Berlin went away to-day. You have won the hearts of all my friends
here, particularly the Grosses Sc the Hays. I hope the old man is
feeling better for his trip. I wish we had a Congress every year.
I do not know when I have enjoyed myself so much. Love to the
chicks Sc kind regards to ^ Cooie ’ & to the girls Sc Mrs. Molson.
By the way tell the latter that I shall wake up at an early date to
the sense of my God-paternal duties.

On the following day he writes to Dr. Ogden who has
been ill : ^ So sorry for your b.t.m. You must take a good
rest at Hamilton. I shall send you C. P. of Ch. when out
& T’s letter when I find it. I have settled at work — after
a long spree. Get well soon.’ In this cryptic note the
^ Cerebral Palsies of Children ’ at least can be identified,
and though the lectures had already appeared during the
summer they were being issued in book form, in an English
and American edition.

T 0 William Pepper from W, 0 . 1502 Walnut St.

Oct. 3rd, 1888.

I have received a definite offer from the J. H. authorities & have
deteianined to accept it. I shall leave you with deep regret. You
have been like a good, kind brother. There need be no hurry about
any official action, & I only write this so that you may be the first
to know of it.

His acceptance must have come as a surprise, for there
could have been no intimation of it even among his close
friends, to judge from a contemporary letter written by
H. P. Bowditch ; ‘ Osier is going to take a position in the
Johns Hopkins University. I don’t think this is quite fair
of him for we wanted him in Boston you know, but sup-
posed he couldn’t be induced to leave Philadelphia.’ The
appointment created a great stir, and, widely heralded, was
accorded universal approbation, for his popularity was
already widespread. His mother wrote ; ^ Thanks for the
Baltimore paper. How proud I ought to be of you. I wonder
am I, perhaps so — this I do know that my heart is full of

Aet. 39

The Hopkins offer Accepted 299

love and thankfulness to Him who has showered so many
blessings on my life in the matter of dear precious sons and
daughters ’ : and she changes the topic quickly, to say that
she is going to give his father the digitalis again : ^ Ten
drops I think you said before each meal/

To H.V, Ogden from W, O. 10/12/88.

Dear old Man, I hope you are all well again — sound at bottom.
The die is cast. I go to J. H. in May. You must pay me an annual
visit & I hope to be able to treat you better than I did here. Do me
two favours.

1. Write me what you know — ^not more than i vol. of the F

family, good & bad, a private communication which will not be used
in any way against the poor fellow. Have you heard how he is
getting on ?

2. That sporosperm specimen — Have you the rabbit or pieces?
Write me a little note of the same des. of the tumours, & send a bit
of the muscle if you can.

So he was to have about six months’ leeway, and the
transition did not disturb him very much, for his possessions
as in 1875 and 1884 were chiefly in his head — and heart —
and though a move might be painful it was not laborious.
President Gilman, who himself was not particularly given
to brevity in his expressions of feeling, must have cogitated
over the following note from the new appointee, evidently
written in reply to his cordial welcome — but what more was
there to say ?

To D, C. Gilman from W. 0 . Oct. 30th.

Dear Sir, Many thanks for your kind letter. I look forward with
the greatest pleasure to my life in Baltimore and I am sure that
I shall be very happy and comfortable. Sincerely yours, Osler.
Thanks for the letter.

Much discussion was aroused in University of Pennsylvania
circles in regard to his successor, for his departure would
necessitate a shift in existing positions in the Faculty, and
an active canvass was started in which his support was
naturally sought :

Dear Musser, I have got to go out of town at i p m. & cannot
go to 4th St. I shall go down certainly on Friday a.m. & enclose
the cheque so that you can pay it in at your bank. So sorry for the
neglect but I have not been down town since my return. We could
go to the U C after the meeting and have a chat. I have not heard

Aet. 39 Medicine and the Muses 301

and forced a lead-pencil into the armpit ; a gush of blood followed
and the arm became black-and-blue to the wrist. The aneurysm
involved the axillary vessels. He subsequently lived a very athletic
life, rowed in the Argonaut Boat Club, and served in the South
African War where he came under Sir G. H. Makins’ care. He was
invalided in consequence of a sudden pain on the left of the head
and neck, and the patient was positive that the tumour had enlarged.
He wrote me on October 17th, 1904, saying that he had marched
160 miles in 32 days and fought 16 battles, with the result of increas-
ing the aneurysm very materially, particularly at the base of the
neck. He died in May, 1909, 31 years aftei the accident, of gradual
heart-failure.

1889

The January issue of the Montreal Medical Journal for
this year contained about the last of his Addisonian series
of ^ Notes and Comments It was inspired by an account
of an ancient Greek hospital recently excavated at Athens ;
and from this he was led on to speak of the description in
Marius the Epicurean ’ of the hospital in the Etrurian
hills where Marius had sought relief and been visited by the
great Galen. Next he took up Inge’s ^Society in Rome
under the Caesars and then ^ The Autocrat saying :

Literature has often been enriched by those who have deserted
medicine for the muses. But to drink deep draughts at Pierian
springs unfits, and when the thirst is truly divine should unfit,
a man for the worrying rounds of practice. It is shocking to think
that had Goldsmith secured the confidence of the old women in
Bankside, Southwark, we should probably never have known the
Vicar, Olivia, or Tony Lumpkin. Still worse, to think of what we
should have lost had Keats passed on from a successful career at
Guy’s to obtain even a distinguished position as a London Surgeon !
Happily, such men soon kick free from the traces in which the average
doctor trots to success.

The most conspicuous modern example of success in both fields
is offered by the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, who for many
years occupied the Chair of Anatomy at Harvard, and who as a young
man made permanent contributions to practical medicine. In his
last book, ‘ One Hundred Days in Europe ’, he mentions having sat
next to Mr. Lawson Tait at dinner and he suggests the question,
‘ Which would give most satisfaction to a thoroughly humane and
unselfish being of cultivated intelligence and lively sense — to have

aneurysm of the axillary vessels of thirty years’ duration, in the Lancet^
Lond., 1913, ii. 1248.

302 University of Pennsylvania jan. 1889

written all the plays which Shakespeare has left for an inheritance
to mankind, or to have snatched from the jaws of death scores of
suffering women and restored them to a sound and comfortable
existence ? ’ I know of no man who could so well make answer to
this question as the Autocrat himself. Would he rather go down
to posterity as the man who, in this country at least, first roused
the profession to a sense of the perils of puerperal fever as an in-
fectious disease — and who thereby has probably saved more lives
than Lawson Tait — and whose essay on the subject — pace shades
of Meigs and Hodge — is a classic in American literature, or would
he choose to be remembered as the author of ‘ The Pearly Nautilus ’
and ‘ The Last Leaf ’ ?

Pearly ’ was of course a slip for ^ Chambered but the
thought led him to write to the Autocrat from whom he
received this reply :

From O. W. Holmes to W, 0 . Boston, Jan. 21, 1889.

My dear Sir, — I have rarely been more pleased than by your
allusions to an old paper of mine. There was a time certainly in
which I would have said that the best page of my record was that
in which I had fought my battle for the poor poisoned women.
I am reminded of that Essay from time to time, but it was published
in a periodical which died after one year’s life and therefore escaped
the wider notice it would have found if printed in the American
Journal of the Medical Sciences. A lecturer at one of the great
London Hospitals referred to it the other day and coupled it with
some fine phrases about myself which made me blush, either with
modesty or vanity, I forget which.

I think I will not answer the question you put me. I think oftenest
of the Chambered Nautilus ’, which is a favourite poem of mine,
though I wrote it myself. The Essay only comes up at long intervals,
the poem repeats itself in my memory and is very often spoken of
by my correspondents in terms of more than ordinary praise. I had
a savage pleasure, I confess, in handling these two Professors —
learned men both of them, skilful experts, but babies as it seemed
to me in their capacity of reasoning and arguing. But in writing
the poem I was filled with a better feeling, the highest state of mental
exaltation and the most crystalline clairvoyance, as it seemed to me,
that had ever been granted to me. I mean that lucid vision of one’s
thought and all forms of expression which will be at once precise
and musical which is the poet’s special gift, however large or small
in amount or value. There is some selfish pleasure to be had out of
the poem, perhaps a nobler satisfaction from the life-saving labour. . . .

Osier’s interest in such a matter at this juncture would
make it appear that his coming transplantation was looked

Aet. 39 Hospitals and Hotels 303

upon with composure, though it must inevitably have
greatly increased the calls upon his time ; for he not only
had to participate in the local canvass for his successor, but
it was necessary also for him to secure a desirable personnel
for the medical clinic to be organized in Baltimore. In
spite of all this, such an admission as he makes in the following
note was most unusual :

[Jan. 10, 1889].

Dear Musser, Sorry I could not join you last eve. but I was
dead beat, having had a most tiring afternoon, & with a — for me
unusual thing — splitting headache. So I went to bed at 9.30. I shall
certainly do what you suggest. I have with Ps [Pepper’s] consent
appointed Fred Packard. I have called 3 times on P. since my return
& have missed him. I shall try to see him soon & talk about you.

Then too, as his frequent notes to D. C. Gilman show,
there were many calls to attend conferences in Baltimore
which he somehow managed to work in during his week-
ends. One of these notes towards the end of January reads :

^ I will join you at the 5 th ave. Hotel about noon on Sunday.’
There had been a deal of discussion in regard to the future
housekeeping arrangements of the new hospital, and, as the
time for the opening drew near, Mr. Gilman had decided
on a course of which the following account (somewhat
inaccurate so far as dates are concerned) was written by
Osier many years after :

The opening of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889 marked a new
departure in medical education in the United States. It was not
the hospital itself, as there were many larger and just as good ; it
was not the men appointed, as there were others quite as well quali-
fied ; it was the organization. For the first time in an English-
speaking country a hospital was organized in units, each one in charge
of a head or chief. The day after my appointment I had a telegram
from Dr. Gilman, President of the university, who had been asked
to open the hospital, to meet him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New
York. He said to Dr. Welch and me : I have asked you to come
here as the manager is an old friend of mine, and we will spend
a couple of days ; there is no difference really between a hospital
and a hotel.’ We saw everything arranged in departments, with
responsible heads, and over all a director. ^ This he said, ‘ is really
the hospital, and we shall model ours upon it. The clinical unit of
a hospital is the exact counterpart of one of the sub-divisions of any
great hotel or department-store.’

304 University of Pennsylvania Mar. 1889

Other things, too, at this complicated period must have
served to interrupt his usual routine. Requests for con-
sultations, which up to this time had been few and far
between, began to pour in so that he must have been hard
pressed to meet his fixed obligations as a conscientious
teacher and writer. A number of addresses had been
promised for April and May, and his valedictory to the
Pennsylvania students was ahead of him — enough to stagger
any one less capable than he of getting out of each day the
best there was in it.^

Early in March he had offered the position, as his house
physician or assistant in Baltimore, to Dr. H. A. Lafleur of
Montreal, a McGill graduate of two years’ standing who had
been acting as locum tenens for Wyatt Johnston in Osier’s
former post as Pathologist to the Montreal General. And
this important point settled, he shortly after writes to
Ogden :

I go to B. in May. We are getting the Hosp in order. If you
know of any A.A.i. copper-bottomed young graduate in the West
who could serve for a year as Interne I should like one. He must
come with your entire approbation. I shall take Lafleur from
Montreal as my Chef de Clinique in charge of the Clin. Lab. & general
supervisor of the ward work. We shall need 2-5 resident graduates
— ultimately 10-20 & they are to be selected from the country
at large.

In the midst of all this he was burdened with anxiety over
what proved in each case to be a fatal iUness from pneumonia
of two of his devoted friends. Late in March word had come
that Palmer Howard had been taken ill, and Osier left
almost immediately for Montreal and was with him until
his death, which occurred on Tuesday morning of March
28 th. He had remained conscious to the end, and the sad
duty devolved upon Osier of taking in turn each of the
children by the hand to their father’s bedside for his last
messages. His affection for Howard had been truly filial,

^ He was also busy with the chapter on ‘ Congenital Affections of the
Heart ’ for Keating’s monumental Encyclopaedia of the Diseases of Children
— an article which remains a classic on the subject, and must have required
an immense amount of reading even though he was able to draw largely on
his Montreal post-mortem material for many of his illustrations of cardiac
anomalies.

Aet. 39 The Role of the Phagocytes 305

and to see him thus overtaken when in the full tide of his
professional and collegiate life was a heavy blow. Howard
in turn had loved Osier as a son, and the three younger
children, who from now on came after a fashion to be
regarded as Osier’s wards, had always looked upon him
from their earliest years as a combination of elder brother,
playmate, and father confessor.

Heavy at heart, he had little time to dwell upon his loss,
for he was called promptly to Ottawa for an important
consultation ; and from there, stopping only for a few hours
in Toronto — ‘ on Friday morning to leave a bit of sunshine ’,
as his mother wrote — he appeared in New York on April 3rd
for his promised address before the Alumni Association of
the Bellevue Hospital. His subject was ‘ Phagocytosis ’, and
he gave a detailed presentation of the theory elaborated by
Elie Metchnikoff, who had recently joined the staff of the
Pasteur Institute in Paris. The address shows an astonishing
degree of familiarity with all the recent literature, mostly in
German, pertaining to a complicated subject, which con-
cerns the scavenger -like function of the wandering white
blood-corpuscles in picking up and engulfing foreign
materials ; but it was a topic to which Osier had made
significant contributions himself. From the time he first
observed the manner in which ‘ the pond amoebae play
among the desmids, diatoms and algae ’ to his later studies
of the fate of the coal-dust particles inhaled into the lungs
of miners, he had pursued the subject along his own lines ;
and he was particularly interested in determining the role
of the phagocytes during the course of his investigations of
malaria. One would have supposed that such a disease as
this would offer the best possible means of studying the
process in the actual blood current, but it proved otherwise,
and Osier’s conclusion drawn from his personal observations
was that ‘ while phagocytosis is a widespread and important
physiological process throughout the animal kingdom, and
while it undoubtedly plays a most important part in many
pathological conditions, the question of an active destruc-
tive warfare waged by the body cells against the micro-
organisms of disease must still be considered an open one.^

New York Medical Journal, 1889, dix. 393-400, -

2933-1

3o6 University of Pennsylvania Apr. 1889

Howard’s death was not the only blow. Even before his
return to Philadelphia news had come of the acute illness
of Samuel W. Gross, his friend and colleague of the ‘ News ’
Board, who begged to see him. He was found critically ill,
and on April i6th, only five years after the death of his
distinguished father, he in turn died at his house in Walnut
Street where Osier had passed many happy hours. During
the remainder of April he must have been at his wits’ end.
Yet a number of papers were finished and it may be taken
for granted that he in no wise neglected his students and his
clinics. For the first time in years, owing to an engage-
ment to give an address in Baltimore, he had to forgo
his Easter visit in Toronto, and on April 24th his mother
writes :

We are all more than disappointed to find that you cannot come
this Easter tide, but will not be selfish for I’m sure just at this time
you must be almost dazed and a few days after you have once changed
quarters will be more of a rest for your dear old brains, (I won’t
say bones) though I fancy they are wearied now and then. A postcard
and note came for you last week but so far nothing in the shape of
a parcel has come except the coat from Ottawa. If it should come
in time to forward the trousers they will be sent direct but supposing
there is delay send a card to say whether they shall be forwarded
to Philadelphia or Baltimore as I suppose you will be there after
May 1st. In all your turmoil I do trust you will keep well and find
things fit in without much worry — the loss of those two friends
has I know been a hard trial for you to bear for your heart is not of
stone and you know' why all trials are sent — just to make us more
like unto our Master and to fit us for the Home which He has gone
to prepare for His people. You will be glad to hear that Father
keeps fairly well . . .

Sbe had reason to be concerned for his ‘ dear old brains ’,
though they seemed to be working smoothly enough for he
had managed to prepare an address which was delivered
April 23rd in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the state
medical association — a body which bears the honoured
name of ‘ The Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State
of Maryland ’. There were at this time five medical schools
in Baltimore, in addition to the new one which was in
prospect, all but one or two being schools of a very low order.
Osier had fearlessly chosen as his subject ‘ The Licence to

Aet. 39 A New Voice in Maryland 307

Practise and then and there took up the cudgels which
he never ceased wielding for higher standards of medical
preparation. In this he was a true disciple of Palmer
Howard, for it was the role his preceptor had long played
in Canada. He handled his subject squarely and without
gloves or apology, though it was one which closely touched
certain vested rights of the Medical and Chirurgical
Faculty. Only a few years before, a bill advocating a State
Board of Examiners had been rejected, and the schools of
medicine, largely managed in the interests of the professors,
were private enterprises whose diplomas carried a qualifica-
tion for practice after attendance at two sessions without
further tests, a condition resulting in a state of things which
in Osier’s words made the American system ” of medical
education a byword amongst the nations ’ :

... It makes one’s blood boil to think that there are sent out
year by year scores of men, called doctors, who have never attended
a case of labour, and who are utterly ignorant of the ordinary every-
day diseases which they may be called upon to treat ; men who
may never have seen the inside of a hospital ward and who would
not know Scarpa’s space from the sole of the foot. Yet, gentlemen,
this is the disgraceful condition which some school-men have the
audacity to ask you to perpetuate ; to continue to entrust interests
so sacred to hands so unworthy. Is it to be wondered, considering
this shocking laxity, that there is a widespread distrust in the public
of professional education, and that quacks, charlatans and impostors
possess the land ?

The difficulties, as he pointed out, which confronted
legislative bodies, lay in the fact that they could not support
class legislation which would debar from patients thehomoeo-
paths and eclectics whose curricula differed from that of the
regular schools only in the matter of therapeutics.

We cannot, however, escape from the important fact that in the
eyes of the law we all stand equal, and if we wish legislation for the
protection of the public we have got to ask for it together, not
singly. I know that this is gall and wormwood to many — at the
bitterness of it the gorge rises ; but it is a question which has to
be met fairly and squarely. When we think of the nine or ten
subjects which we have in common, we may surely, in the interests
of the public, bury animosities, and agree to differ on the question
of Therapeutics.

^ Maryland Medical Journal^ 1889, xxi. 61.

3o8 University of Pennsylvania May 1889

But it was not all indignation, for he gives a very clear
outline of the course which must be pursued, and his
prophecy — ‘ It needs not the vision of a son of Beor to
advertise that within ten years in scarcely a State in the
Union will the degree carry with it the privilege of registra-
tion ’ — was fulfilled. Thus a new, a vigorous, and convincing
voice with a real message was raised before the assembled
profession of Maryland, with none of the usual amenities
and platitudes which might have been expected from a new-
comer in their midst, and above all from one who' was not
even a naturalized citizen. There must have been wagging
of heads, but there was no mistaking the fact that a new
leader, whose words carried weight, had addressed them.

This incident, so characteristic of Osier’s fearlessness of
criticism when he felt strongly on any question, is given
prominence for another reason. It introduces him in a new
role, other than that of student and scholar, namely, as the
ardent protagonist for the advancement and welfare of the
profession as a whole. And the Marylanders whom he had
thus addressed came shortly to regard him not only as their
accepted leader, but at the same time with no less devotion
for his personal qualities than was universally felt for him in
Philadelphia.

To President Gilman from W. 0 , Wednesday [May i, 1889].

I have been so worried & driven during the past month that
I have not had time to go down. I shall be down on Saturday by
the 10.20 train & will drive direct to your office.

PS. I enclose a list — I hope not too long — of personal friends to
whom I would like invitations to be sent.

On this same morning of May 1st he gave his valedictory
address to the Pennsylvania students. He was brief, and
chose to consider but two of the score of elements which
might contribute to their future success or be of help in
days of failure. The first of these was imperturbability, the
second equanimity. Of this second quality he said :

Let me recall to your minds an incident of that best of men and
wisest of rulers, Antoninus Pius, who as he lay dying in his home at
Lorium in Etruria, summed up the philosophy of life in the watch-
word, Aequanimitas. As for him, about to 'pz&s fiammantia moenia
mundi (the flaming ramparts of the world), so for you, fresh from

Aet. 39 The Watchword of Antoninus Pius 309

Clotho’s spindle, a calm equanimity is the desirable attitude. How
difficult to attain, yet how necessary, in success as in failure !

Then in addressing the Faculty, after referring to the
recent loss of Edward Bruen ; to the loss sustained by their
sister college (Jefferson) in the death of S. W. Gross ; and of
his own personal loss in Palmer Howard, he closed by saying:

While preaching to you a doctrine of equanimity, I am, myself,
a castaway. Recking not my own rede, I illustrate the inconsistency
which so readily besets us. One might have thought that in the
premier school of America, in the Ctvitas HtppcraUca^ with associa-
tions so dear to a lover of his profession, with colleagues so dis-
tinguished, and with students so considerate, one might have thought,
I say, that the Hercules Pillars of a man’s ambition had been reached.
But it has not been so ordained, and to-day I sever my connection
with this University. More than once, gentlemen, in a life rich in
the priceless blessings of friends, I have been placed in positions
in which no words could express the feelings of my heart, and so it
is with me now. The keenest sentiments of gratitude well up from
my innermost being at the thought of the kindliness and goodness
which have followed me at every step during the past five years.
A stranger — I cannot say an alien — among you, I have been made to
feel at home — more you could not have done. Could I say more ?

On this same Saturday evening he was subjected to
a complimentary dinner. Pepper presided and there were
a number of special out-of-town guests, among them Ross
from Montreal, Billings from Washington, Draper from
New York, and H. P. Bowditch from Boston ; and Bowditch
wrote to his family : ^ Osier’s dinner was quite a festival.
It is extraordinary what a hold he has on the profession in
Philadelphia. He is one of the most popular men I ever
knew.’ Though he was by no means to lose touch with his
many Philadelphia friends of the past five years’ making, any
more than his first transfer had put him out of touch with
his Montreal friends, it was nevertheless an abrupt and
clearly marked break in the period of his American life.
There was to be only one more, after another fifteen years
had elapsed, and when that time came one of his associates
and neighbours, James Wilson, recalled this five years’
sojourn in the Quaker City in the following words :

What did he do for us? He made himself agreeable to the older
men, and demonstrated to the younger men how medicine should

310 University of Pennsylvania May 1889

be learned and taught. He broadened our conceptions in regard to
the inductive method in medicine. Facts, facts, and always the
facts. The facts of the ward, of the microscope, of the laboratory,
of the post-mortem room. He made it clear to some of the younger
men who are now reaping the reward of their work that it is not
necessary for every man to be a practitioner in the ordinary sense,
but that long years of hospital and laboratory work constitute
a better equipment for the teacher and the consultant. He inspired
his students with enthusiasm for letters and taught them the rare
rewards that come of searching the medical scriptures. He showed
that in the democracy of our profession any man is free by a prin-
ciple of self-election to attain the most coveted post of distinction
and honour. He pointed out not only to us, but to all men, how
fine and noble the profession of medicine is for those in it who are
fine and noble.

He ornamented his discourse with quaint allusions to Holy Writ
and the Pilgrim’s Progress, but did not in those days say much
about Montaigne and the Religio Medici, and rarely alluded to
Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless, he helped some of us to
do a little thinking. At length, after the fashion of the nautilus, he
builded a more stately mansion and left us. We would have fain
kept him ; but that could not be.^

^ J, C. Wilson : ‘ Remarks at Farewell Dinner to Dr. Osier, May 2, 1905.’
Privately printed.

CHAPTER XIII

1889-90

THE JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL. ORGANIZATION OF

A CLINIC

Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore merchant, a bachelor and
a Quaker of economical habits, had amassed during and
after the Civil War what for the time seemed a princely
fortune. Influenced, it is said, by a conversation with his
former fellow townsman, the London banker and philan-
thropist George Peabody, he came to believe that there
were two things that were sure to endure — ‘ a university,
for there will always be youth to train ; and a hospital, for
there will always be suffering to relieve.’ Consequently,
on his death in 1873 he left in the hands of his chosen
trustees the sum of seven million dollars to be equally
divided between the two institutions which were to per-
petuate his name. The two boards of trustees, which were
largely interlocking, in the unhurried manner said to have
characterized all their actions proceeded to choose a leader,
and, with rare wisdom, two years later decided upon
Daniel Coit Gilman, then President of the University of
California. To the sagacity of this man probably more
than to any other single influence, the institution owes
its foundation upon ‘ the idea of a university ’, to use
Cardinal Newman’s phrase, as distinct from that of a college.

For twelve years — ^since 1877 — the hospital had been
building. Despite an endowment of three and a half
million, the hospital Trustees, with a degree of foresight
unusual in a lay board unfamiliar -with the problems involved,
had bided their time and utilized only the accrued income
of the large fund at their disposal in constructing the plant.
They had been fortunate in the selection of John S. Billings
as their medical adviser, and the general plans of the hospital
which were the product of his brain, had been erected in the
so-called ‘ pavilion ’ style, an outgrowth of the system of
separated wards with which Billings had been so familiar
in the army hospitals during the later years of the Civil

3 1 2 The Johns Hopkins Hospital May 1889

War. The grounds were extensive, comprising four city
blocks on the crest of a hill — a superb site which had been
selected by Mr. Hopkins himself, on the eastern edge of the
city of his day. The university, ‘ across-town had no such
setting — indeed for the casual visitor was hard to find —
for Mr. Gilman believed in spending more money on men
and their tools than on buildings, and the first group
of six professors he had assembled — Gildersleeve, Rowland,
Sylvester, Remsen, Morris, and, in biology, Huxley’s pupil
Newell Martin — fully justified his judgement, for they
quickly placed the Johns Hopkins, as a university in fact
rather than in name, far in the lead of all other institutions
in the land which were endeavouring to establish higher
courses for graduates. It was looked upon in educational
circles as more or less of an experiment, though one in
which all confessedly were deeply interested. From the
outset the place had been well advertised — almost too well
on its baptismal day in 1876 when Huxley delivered the
inaugural discourse without accessories of music, prayer
or benediction — a perfectly consistent Quaker procedure.
‘ Vain it was to mention the unquestioned orthodoxy of
the Trustees and the ecclesiastical ties of those who had
been selected to be the professors. Huxley was bad enough :
Huxley without a prayer was intolerable.’ ^

Great changes however may occur in thirteen years, and
though there was still considerable local hostility towards ‘the
Hopkins ’, it was beginning to give way under the unques-
tioned excellence of the university programme and the
rapidly growing fame of the institution which made it in
the early years a Mecca for the most brilliant of the young

^ Cf. Daniel Colt Gilman : ‘ The Launching of a University.’ N.Y.,
Dodd, Mead & Co , 1906. To D. C. Gilman, the hospital as well as the
university owed much. Andrew Carnegie said that Gilman’s special gift was
in drawing all men after him by pleasing all and offending none, ‘ doing the
absolutely necessary ungentle things in a gentle way ’ And Osier in his
‘ Fixed Period ’ address said his association with him had been an education
and a revelation, adding : ‘ I had never before been brought into close
contact with a man who loved difSculties just for the pleasure of making them
disappear. But I am not going to speak of these happy days lest it should
forestall the story I have written of the inner history of the first period of the
hospital ’ — a history, be it said, as yet unpublished.

Before Osier’s Advent

Aet. 39

313

scholars of the land who were looking for inspiration and
post-collegiate instruction.

During all this time B illin gs had been writing and lecturing
on the subject of the hospital and the proposed medical
school, and meanwhile all the leaders of medicine of two
continents had been consulted by Gilman. In 1883 the
first step had been taken towards a provisional medical
faculty consisting of Ira Remsen in chemistry, Newell
Martin in biology, and William H. Welch, who had been
called from New York to take a Chair of Pathology — the
first time such a post had been established on a full univer-
sity basisd

On Welch’s return from abroad in 1886 something more
nearly resembling an institute of experimental medicine
than anything the country had seen before was soon in
operation in the first building erected on the hospital
grounds. Here, from 1886 to 1889, courses in patho-
logy for graduates were given, and around Welch there
gathered a group of enthusiastic co-workers, including
Franklin P. Mall, the first appointed Fellow, Sternberg,
Councilman, Halsted, Abbott, Bolton, Flexner, Booker, and
Walter Reed, some of whom were to remain as permanent
appointees. As a culmination of all this, the formal opening
of the hospital, coinciding as it did with Osier’s advent, was
widely heralded. Not only the medical but the lay press
of the month contained elaborate accounts of the hospital,
its plans, specifications, and purposes. No plant certainly
was ever dedicated under more favourable circumstances,

^ ‘ Matthew Hay [writes Dr. Welch] was appointed to the Chair of Pharma-
cology in 1884. at the same time that I was elected to the Chair of Pathology.
We corresponded about plans for the school, but never met. I see that Hay
records this in “ Who ’s Who When I was appointed it was intended to
proceed with the selection of other members of the medical faculty, so as to
be ready to open the school at the same time that the hospital was opened,
which It was thought then would be in two or three years Then came the
financial difiRculties due to failure of the B. & O. to pay dividends on the
stock, and I found myself somewhat stranded as regards medical teaching and
human autopsies. If we had been able to proceed, say in 1885 or 1886, with
the selection of other members of the Faculty we should probably have
missed Mall, Abel, Halsted, Kelly and, above all, Osier, and our fate might
have been very different. Martin became incapacitated only just as we were
starting the medical school in 1893.’

314 The Johns Hopkins Hospital May 1889

nor with a more widespread interest in what the future
might have in store for it.

On Monday, May 6 th, the new hospital buildings were
thrown open for public inspection, and on the following
day came the formal opening which this time — thanks to
the outcry thirteen years before — began with prayer and
ended with music.

... It was a brilliant day, and notabilities, medical and other-
wise, from Baltimore and the principal medical schools of America
were grouped under the vast dome of the administration building to
witness the inauguration of what was confidently believed to be the
last word in hospital construction and management for the scientific
study and treatment of disease. There was a feeling of elation —
one might even say of exaltation — that the structure which had
taken twenty years to evolve, absorbing the energies and thought
of so many able minds, had at last become a. fait accompli. And to
none more than to Dr. Osier was this a red-letter day. To blaze
a perfectly new road, untrammelled by tradition, vested interests,
or medical ‘ deadwood ’ — best of all, backed by a board of manage-
ment imbued with a fundamental and abiding respect for scientific
opinion and commanding an ample budget — ^what more could the
heart of man desire ? The days that followed were filled with the
many details of organization. There were record-forms and charts
of various sorts to be devised, instruments of precision and appliances
for diagnosis to be purchased, diet lists to be drawn up and, not
least, a clinical laboratory to be furnished and equipped — the latter
a temporary affair, as those who had planned the magnificent pile
of buildings had omitted to make provision for this essential feature
of a medical clinic. With all these matters Dr. Osier busied himself
with his usual cheerful and untiring industry, and the thought that
was uppermost was to have the best that could be obtained.^

The responsibility of organizing the clinic rested primarily
on Osier’s shoulders and, from what has gone before, the
course he would pursue could have been foretold. From
the first, he planned to make much of bedside clinical
teaching, with chief emphasis on practical instruction to
small groups of students ; and though this course could not
be put into effect until the medical school should be opened,
there was meanwhile plenty to do in preparation. Borrowing

^ H. A. Lafleur : ‘ Early Days at the Johns Hopkins Hospital with
Dr. Osier.* Canadian Medical Association Journal, May 1920, Memorial
Number, p. 42.

Aet. 39 Days of Organization 315

from his knowledge of the German clinics, a hierarchy of
long-term hospital residents was established to take the
place of the usual brief period of interneship, which had
been and still continues to be the custom in most hospitals.
He had made a wise choice in Lafleur as his Resident
Physician, under whom J. A. Scott and Harry Toulmin,
recent Philadelphia graduates, were to be the first Assistant
Residents ; and around this nucleus there gathered an ever-
increasing group of devoted satellites. One of them,
H. M. Thomas, a Baltimorean whose father was one of the
Quaker members of the original Board of Trustees, has given
an account ^ of those thrilling days, when the staff was
a closely united body energized by Osier’s example, engaging
personality, and generosity, for ‘ he saw to it that the younger
men got the whole credit of the work when often it should
have gone to himself’.

Five venturesome patients visited the dispensary the
morning its doors were thrown open, and a few days later,
on May 15th to be exact, the first case, one of aortic
aneurysm, was admitted to the single medical ward then
ready for occupancy ; and from this small beginning things
must have moved rapidly, for a fortnight later he scribbled
on a card to Musser : ‘ ’Spital booming — very busy.’ ^
On the 1st of June a public announcement had been made
of the provisional staff organization, consisting of Osier as
Physician-in-Chief vnth his three assistants, while Welch
as Pathologist-in-Chief was represented by W. T. Council-
man and Alexander Abbott in residence. As the ambulatory
clinic for out-patients was to be made a feature of the
hospital, Halsted, temporarily appointed Acting Surgeon,
was put in charge with F. J. Brockway as the first Resident
Surgeon, and J. M. T. Finney and G. S. Clarke as his
assistants. All these first-comers, with Mr. Gilman as

^ H. M. Thomas : ‘ Some Memories of the development of the Medical
School, and of Osier’s Advent.’ "Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1919?

XXX, 1 88 .

^ He was not too bus^, however, later in the month to attend the annual
meeting, in Newport, of the American Medical Association, where he
reported a case of * Word Blindness with Hemianopsia ’, published later in
the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for Mar. 1891, ci. 219;

3i6 The Johns Hopkins Hospital June 1889

Acting Director, lived together in the hospital during
these first few months while the wards one after another
were being opened.

Tfl H. V. Ogden from W. 0 . Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore,

June 26th, 1889.

Dear Ogden, I send my Cerebral Palsies of Kids, & a val. address.
Health Boards will save the profession in this country if well organ-
ized. Wish you could come down here — bed always at your dis-
posal. We are in full swing — 50 patients in wards & averaging
60-80 in Dispensaries daily. I am largely responsible for Kelly
who is the highest gynepod & one of the best operators in the
country. I know him intimately. He has a bitter enemy in
J — P — & I have no doubt some of his friends have been talking.
His record is remarkable. His third successful Caesarian — mothers
& children — ^was performed 6 weeks ago. I wish we could have had
Senn here. That Washington escapade & those letters killed him
in the East. I shall be in Toronto for Aug. ist. Was there last
week — all well. Yours ever, W. 0 .

Howard A. Kelly, with his former assistant and future
Resident Hunter Robb, joined the group later in the
summer ; and finally, early in August Henry M. Hurd,
previously head of the State Hospital for the Insane at
Pontiac, Michigan, who had been chosen as the future
Superintendent, came to relieve Mr. Gilman from his self-
imposed task. Except for the suite of rooms set apart for
Dr. Hurd and his family, for he was the only married
member of the household, the most desirable rooms in the
administration building were given over to the juniors,
several of whom rejoiced in a separate study and bedroom —
such quarters, indeed, as hospital internes had never before
known.

So this original group living intimately together, the
chiefs and their juniors, became a closely knit body of
friends who knew how to work as well as to play together.
One may be sure that much lively banter passed between
these active-minded people and that their individual
foibles were not spared. The new Superintendent ceased
to preface his remarks by : ‘ I once knew a man in Pontiac,
&c.’ after he had reprimanded the staff one morning for
putting an out-of-town visitor, unable safely to negotiate

Aet. 39 A Congenial Household 317

his way across town, in bed the night before in one of the
wards ; for he was told ^ it was the man from Pontiac ^
It was a toss-up as to who would have the upper hand in
some practical joke played on one or the other and carried
out with solemn face. Osier one Saturday night had been
to see Richard Mansfield in The Parisian Romance ’ —
a play in which Mansfield dies of a well-simulated stroke
of apoplexy. The pathologists of the hospital naturally
enough were eager not to lose any opportunity for post-
mortem examinations ; and on Osier’s return, seeing
Councilman reading in the common-room, he announced
that there had been a fatality — a cerebral haemorrhageS —
and an immediate autopsy was requested. This hint was
promptly taken by Councilman and Abbott, who repaired
to the pathological laboratory and made their preparations ;
but as nothing happened, after a long wait they telephoned
the ward and learned the true facts. Osier had long since
gone to bed and taken the precaution of locking his door.
In some reminiscences of those days, one of the victims of
this prank ^ recalls that —

. . . He [Osier] was then not quite forty and looked younger,
a well-knit but rather spare figure, of about the average height,
a rather long moustache, the position of the ends of which seemed
to vary with his mood ; hair even then a little spare, a clear but
rather sallow complexion, a broad forehead, good eyes and lively
expression. I think that any stranger with good knowledge of men
would have thought him from appearance interesting and been
attracted by him. His clothes were always simple and worn well,
and he fancied cravats of rather striking colour. At first, with the
exception of Welch and Mall, we all lived in the hospital, our rooms
in the main building were capacious, comfortably furnished, and
the outlook over the city and harbour was fine. No one of the
small group of men who participated in the hospital life at this early
period can forget its fascination. ... We breakfasted together, then
each sought his particular duties, to meet again at luncheon. The
luncheon hour, at which most of those working at the hospital
gathered, was the most delightful of the day. Osier, Welch, Halsted,
Mall, Lafleur, and with the usual visiting stranger, sat at a table in
the end of the dining-room. The conversation was always lively
and interesting : everyone sought to bring something to the feast.

^ W. T. Councilman : ‘ Osier in the Early Days, &c,’ Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal, April 1920.

3 1 8 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Summer 1889

There was talk about work ; jokes, and laughter. A favourite game
in which Osier rather excelled — his early experience with Egerton Y.
Davis and the Caughnawauga Indians having given him previous
practice — was to relate the impossible and to lead up to this so
skilfully that the line between fact and fiction was obscured. It was
very well for us who knew the game, but occasionally it would be
played when the serious visitor was present and he often carried
away with him striking information of new facts in medical science.
The exchanges between Osier and Halsted were always a delight,
and we all sought to get something on the other. I remember once
that I had gone to Philadelphia to read a paper on a subject in
which we were all interested, but unfortunately I had mistaken the
date by a week, at that time not being accustomed to think of evils
long in advance. I was naturally somewhat fearful of the fact being
ascertained, and the first thing, the next day, Osier asked me about
the paper, how it had been accepted, what was the discussion, etc.
I rather welcomed the opportunity to get the matter over with and
spoke of the enthusiastic reception accorded the paper and gave at
some length the discussion upon it. ^ What did Wilson say ? ’ asked
Osier, and I thought it well to put Wilson in opposition and gave
as well as I could his opposing argument. ‘ Yes,’ said Osier, ^ Jim
Wilson spent last night with me and said he immensely enjoyed your
paper but he could not quite agree with you.’

Two things must not be lost sight of in regard to the
chiefs-of-service. Their youth in the first place ; for
Osier, not quite 40, was the senior in years, with Welch
a year younger, Halsted 37, Hurd 36, and Kelly only 31.
In the second place, these young men, as had been true of
those originally gathered to make the nucleus of the univer-
sity, had been imported into a conservative community
which had its own fine medical traditions, and it is but
natural that there must have been some heart-burnings
that there was no representative of the Baltimore pro-
fession on the new Faculty. On the part of the new-
comers, it was a situation requiring a combination of
patience, of tact, of good-fellowship, of kindly feeling and,
at the same time, evidence of indubitable professional
superiority.

Though the nurses’ training-school had not as yet been
formally opened nor its directress chosen, a number of
capable women had been attached from time to time, one
of whom, an Englishwoman, graduate of the Florence
Nightingale school, a Miss Louisa Parsons, of whose sad

Aet 39

A Visit to Tracadie

319

death years later the circumstances will be told, was tem-
porarily put in charge. During most of the summer Osier
remained at his post, for though Baltimore in midsummer
is not an ideal place for sustained wort, the hospital is so
fortunately situated that life there is comfortable enough.

^0 President Gilman from W, 0 . The Johns Hopkins Hospital,

July 19th, 1889.

Dear Mr. Gilman, — I dare say you will be glad to have a line or
two from me giving an account of my stewardship. The machine
w^orks smoothly, thanks to your manipulation. Thanks, also to your
arrangements, there has been no trouble so far. The number of
patients keeps about the same — forty-seven to-day. The nurses
continue satisfactory. I think we have been very fortunate in our
selection. I hope that you are enjoying your well earned holiday,
and I will be glad if you will give my regards to Mrs. Gilman —
our lady visitor. Should I get anywhere near Mt. Desert this
summer, I shall assuredly come to Northeast Harbour.

He must have secured a secretary by this time, an un-
wonted luxury, for this is the first of his recovered letters
which was typewritten, all of his previous correspondence
and papers having been written out in longhand. He got
away by the end of August for a visit in Toronto, and from
there in company with his favourite nephew,^ W. W.
Francis, instead of proceeding to Banff, where the Canadian
Medical Association was to meet, he for good and sufficient
reasons went to pay a visit to a doctor-friend in charge of
the leper colony at Tracadie, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence
in the very north-eastern corner of the Province of New
Brunswick. New Brunswick is not so large but that some
Philadelphia friends who weie spending the summer on
the Island of Grand Manan, off the southwest corner of the
Province, joined forces with them as told below :

Visit to the Leper Colony at Tracadie,

W. O took me along — I was only ii. When we started from
Toronto he intended to leave me with some friends in Montreal
and to pick me up on his return a week later. But I was too polite
to refuse the cheese at dinner — it was very high — and I would not
stay in a house where such food was possible. So on I went with him

^ Osier was ‘ uncle ’ by courtesy to all the Francis children, who in reality
were his first-cousins-once-removed.

3 20 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Autumn 1889

to Portland, Maine, and from there to Eastport where we waited
impatiently for a boat from Grand Manan which was bringing two
mysterious friends to join us. They were ‘ the Widow Gross ’
(the first time I saw her) and Miss Woolley ; and the four of us
made the rest of the trip together, via St. John, Bathurst, and a
funny little railway thence to Caraquet on the Bale de Chaleurs,
where we were all put up by a very charming family, with some girls
who made a lot of me. Next day, the rest of them drove 30 miles
to Tracadie and inspected the colony of 18 lepers. I was left
behind with ‘ cold feet ’, the result of heat, lobsters and seeing
some pictures of the lepers. When we got back to Bathurst and the
main line, the train was late, hot and crowded, and the only accom-
modation left for W. O. and me and an enormously fat R. C. bishop
was the smoking-room of the Pullman. The bishop offered to
climb up to the upper berth, but we both looked at his girth, and
he joined us in the laugh. W. O. and I shared the upper, and the
bishop snored horribly. We dropped our companions the next day
at Cacouna. Such is my childhood recollection. Boiled down,
I fear there is nothing in it but the fact of the visit and that
Mrs. Gross accompanied us.

It was a very brief holiday, for September loth finds
him in Washington for a meeting of the Association of
Physicians ; and a few days later he wrote to Ogden to say
that ‘ the hospital flourishes apace ’ and that he is tempted
to stay on for another year rather than to take up his abode
in town. However, he shortly after took up his residence
at 209 West Monument Street, where the eldest daughter
of his brother Featherston, whom he persisted in intro-
ducing as ‘ Mrs. O.’, came to keep house for him. The
arrangement gave him the first opportunity he had ever
had of entertaining in his own home, and it came to be the
exception for him ever to sit at table without having
transient visitors or members of the hospital staff as informal
guests. ‘ I am sure ’, his mother writes, ‘ you will find
the dear Georgie all you could wish, only be careful in having
so many young M. D.’s about and treating them so kindly
too. It is only a very special specimen of its kind that is
to set his affections on your very extra niece.’

On October 9th the Nurses’ Home was formally opened,
and the Training School for which ample provision had
been made was inaugurated with due ceremonies. Isabel
A. Hampton, a remarkably capable woman, a Canadian

Aet 40 Building up Tradition 321

and a graduate of Bellevue Hospital in New York, had been
brought from the Illinois Training School in Chicago, of
which she was then Superintendent, and under her leader-
ship as Principal the school rapidty came to hold high rank,
for it was the first time such a school had been recognized
from the outset as an essential part of the hospital founda-
tion. In this same month, the Monday-evening societies
which came to play such an important part in the life
and work of the hospital staff were organized. The first
and third Mondays of each month were to be given over
to the presentation of interesting cases, to the reading of
papers, and to the discussion of problems in process of
solution. The first meeting was held on October 22nd,
with Welch presiding and Hunter Robb acting as secretary ;
and before this group of enthusiastic young people eager
to advance knowledge and to control opinions by experi-
mental tests, hardly a subject could be mentioned at one of
these gatherings that did not lead to further work in view
of the free and suggestive exchange of ideas. In the history
of medicine there has never been anything quite like it :
there was no need to drum up an audience for these meet-
ings, and it is recalled that Reginald H. Fitz, who at about
this time went down from Boston to learn something of
the spirit of this new place which already was being so
much talked about, likened the life to that of a monastery,
with the unusual feature that the monks did not appear to
bother their minds about the future.

It has been seen that both in Montreal and Philadelphia
Osier had organized a foreign-periodical club ; and so here
what was called ‘ The Journal Club ’ was started, with its
first meeting in the library of the hospital on Thursday
afternoon of October 29th, when the current literature
was reviewed. The recorded purpose of the ‘ club ’ was
‘ to enable aU members of the staff to keep fully informed
as to what is being accomplished by workers in every
branch of medical science with the least expenditure of
time ’ ; and many of these reports and book-reviews
subsequently found their way into Hays’s journal or else-
where, so that others could get them second hand, though
on the printed page the stimulating discussions which took

2923 I Y

322 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Dec. 1889

place on the Thursday afternoons was missing. Such
things as this must have occurred many times before in
other places, but never under more favourable auspices
nor with a more enthusiastic group, undistracted by any
outside calls upon their time and eager to justify their
connexion with a new institution untrammelled by tradi-
tion, whose present and future reputation lay entirely in
their hands.

D. C. Gilman was a wise propagandist and realized the
importance of getting the publications of the workers
stamped with the seal of the university,^ and consequently
the hospital trustees were encouraged to provide suitable
mediums of publication for the medical group — not only
an annual volume on the lines of the famous Reports which
had emanated from some of the London hospitals, but
a monthly journal as well, to contain the reports of meetings,
discussions, and the shorter occasional papers. Thus in
December there appeared the first number of the Johns
Hofkins Hospital Bulletin, which was to play such an
important part in bringing the activities of the hospital
group before the medical world. The first number con-
tained the preliminary account of Welch’s studies on hog
cholera, and a further statement from Osier on the value
of Laveran’s organism in the diagnosis of malaria, a subj ect
in which his juniors had become deeply engrossed, and
which in time led to Thayer’s comprehensive monograph
on the subject. It also contained an announcement of the
courses which were to be offered to graduates, for, dis-
appointed as all must have been in the postponement of
plans to open a medical school, teaching was nevertheless
regarded as an essential stimulus, even for those engaged
actively in research.

At the Medical Society meeting of December i6th
John S. Billings brought over from the Surgeon-General’s
Library some forty items — manuscripts, incunabula, and

^ The American Journal of Mathematics, under Simon Newcomb ; the
American Chemical Journal, under Remsen ; the American Journal of
Philology, under Gildersleeve ; Studies from the Biological Laboratory, under
Martin and Brooks ; and H. B. Adams’s Studies in Historical and Political
Science had already been launched under the aegis of the university.

Aet. 40 Relinquishing Pathology 323

rare medical publications — from among the treasures in the
growing collection in Washington which his foresight
had made possible. An account of the meeting, with a
list of the boots, was published in the Bulletin, and thus
interest was started in the bibliography and history of the
profession, which has since spread widely and for which
Billings primarily, and Osier and Welch in turn, were so
largely responsible. An Historical Club was soon estab-
lished, one Monday evening in each month being given
over to its purposes ; and unless he were ill or away from
home Osier for the fifteen years to follow was unfailing in
his attendance at these Monday-evening gatherings, which
he regarded as educational agencies of great importance to
the hospital and school.

There was a gathering in Toronto late in December to
celebrate the opening of the new biological laboratory,
erected largely through the energies of Professor Ramsay
Wright, on which occasion a number of distinguished
men gave addresses, among them Welch, Charles S. Minot
of Harvard, Vaughan of Ann Arbor, and ‘ our own Osier’,
as the local papers had it. Welch chose as his topic a dis-
cussion of ‘ Pathology in its Relation to General Biology
and on the evening of the 20th a special meeting of the
local Pathological Society was staged, in which all the
guests participated. Accustomed to have Osier play the
major role in Canada as a pathologist, it must have caused
some comment among the profession in Toronto to see
how completely he had relinquished to his colleague the
leadership in a subject which had for so long been the
source of his keenest interest.^ This was inevitable, for
Welch’s appointment represented the first recognition of
pathology as a subj ect entitled to stand alongside of biology

^ Before the Johns Hopkins Medical Society, March 17, 1890, Welch
exhibited a series of gioss and microscopic specimens of entozoa observed in
the domestic animals in Baltimore, and stated that the interest in animal
parasites has been overshadowed of late years by the study of the pathogenic
bacteria, but nevertheless the entozoans are of great interest and importance
and deserve our careful attention As pointed out, Osier had begun his
studies of entozoa many years before and to judge from his note-books he
had gone into the subject even more thoroughly than Welch. Unfortunately
there is no report of any discussion following Welch’s paper.

3 24 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Dec. 1889

and the other sciences on the university calendar. Never-
theless, for Osier to have given up without question the
privilege of conducting the post-mortem studies upon fatal
cases from his own service is merely an example of the
generosity of spirit which pervaded the Hopkins group in
those days. But his long apprenticeship in pathology had
been by no means wasted ; it was unquestionably an ideal
preparation for a clinician and gave him the rare ability to
interpret his patients’ symptoms in terms of the pictures
which his long hours at the autopsy-table had indelibly
stamped on his mind. So, in the text-book he finally came
to write, his pathological descriptions, drawn from his own
experience, were regarded as the best part of his treatise
and could have been written by no other clinician of the
day, unless possibly by Fitz, who had had a similar training.
In his address given on this very occasion Welch stated
that ‘ pathology must constitute the scientific basis of
practical medicine

1890

There was a widespread epidemic of influenza at the
time, almost though not quite so serious as the epidemic
of thirty years later during the Great War ; and his mother
writes in a Christmas letter on his return from Toronto :
‘ I hope the cold you had did not lay you up on the sick
list. This epidemic is everywhere and keeps the poor
M. D.’s very busy, or what is worse lays some of them low ;
every house has its tale to tell.’ Whether he escaped is not
told, but he probably did not, for whenever there were
‘ colds ’ about he was almost certain to be victimized and
it became his custom to surrender immediately, to remain
in bed for a day or two and to saturate himself with litera-
ture in lieu of drugs. As the hospital affairs were flourishing,
as there was no immediate prospect of starting the medical
school, and inasmuch as the staff was so organized that
any one, even ‘ the Chief’, might drop out without affecting
the routine work, he made plans to spend a few months in
Europe, for he had not been abroad since his Goulstonian
Lectures were given five years before. Of these plans he
writes to Mr. Gilman, who, needing a well deserved rest

TriaorG Tmo -f-olr/an Tmg ■PoTnilTr

Aet. 40 A Report to the Ex-director 325

the Mediterranean for the winter months and then to
England, where honorary degrees were bestowed upon him
at Oxford and Cambridge :

To Daniel C, Gilman from W, O. 209 W. Monument Street,

March 6th

Dear Mr. Gilman, I feel rather conscience-stricken that I have
not reported progress to the Ex-Director. Everything works
smoothly on the lines laid down by you but a few details will give
you an idea of our present conditions. We have now had nearly
1,000 in-patients & over 11,000 out-patients I To-day the ward
population is 130 & the income from private patients over $360.
The new Director is excellent in all respects k gets on well with
everyone. I do not know that he has quite our appreciation of the
Training School tho he & Miss Hampton are on the best of terms.
Halsted is doing remarkable work in Surgery Sc I feel that his appoint-
ment to the University & the Hospital would be quite safe. Kelly’s
department is now in full swing. We made a great hit in Sister
Rachel [Miss Bonner] who is a bond of peace, but I tell her that
she has sadly degenerated, & has so far departed from the faith
once delivered to Fox as to frequent playhouses. Miss Hampton
has fulfilled Mis Gilman’s prognosis, and she has been most successful
in getting probationers of a high class ; but unfortunately she
selects them altogether for their good looks & the House staff is by
this time in a sad state. The chief is, I fear hopeless- — you remember
Keats — ‘ They could not in the self-same mansion dwell without
some stir of heart &c,’ but it is not the ^ gentle Isabel Miss Parsons
as I dare say you have heard has gone to the Maryland General.

The Bulletin you will have already seen 6c the first two numbers
of the Reports. Both start with firm support but the latter may
drag a little as it is so hard to get men to write. I leave April 26th by
Etruiia 6c shall be in London about May 6th. My address will be
Brown Bros. Do let me know of your whereabouts as I am most
anxious to talk over the Medical School 6c if possible airange to go to
Cambridge with you. I shall spend the great part of May 6c all
of June in a systematic inspection of six or eight of the leading
German 6c French clinics 6c return to London about July ist. We
follow your progress with great interest 6c all rejoice that you are
having such a good holiday.

The first fasciculus of Volume II of the Hospital Reports
for 1890, to which he refers, comprised seven papers from
Osier’s clinic, and though such publications necessarily
have a small circulation, they had been written — and the
second volume indeed was completed — long before the
papers were all in hand for Volume I, ^ as it is hard to get

326 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Mar. 1890

men to write They were on a variety of clinical topics,
perhaps the most important being those by Osier himself
on tuberculous peritonitis and on the intermittent fever
associated with gall-stones, for which conditions, even at
this early day, he advocated more frequent operative
interference.

At one of the January meetings of the hospital society.
Osier had presented a case of Filaria sanguinis hominis, a
parasitic disease of the tropics and sub-tropics, practically un-
known in northern latitudes, an example of which, however,
had been sent from Charleston to the hospital for study.
Though he had written an editorial on the subject for the
Medical News in 1886, inspired by John Guiteras’s dis-
covery of the parasite, he had probably never before seen
a case to recognize it, and the incident, trivial enough in
itself, is only mentioned to point out again the intense
interest which diseases produced by parasites always roused
in him. It was an interest easily traced, for it almost
certainly began with his observation of the trichinae during
his student days in Toronto, and in natural sequence led
to his collection of the entozoa, to his early papers on
cestode and echinococcal infections, and subsequently in
Philadelphia to his malarial studies. So one may imagine
his delight when on March 22nd of this year he discovered
amoebae in the material secured from an abscess of the
liver of a patient with chronic dysentery whom he had
seen in consultation with Dr. Friedenwald of Baltimore,
and on whom Dr. Tiffany had operated. Not even Leidy
‘ with one more rhizopod to discover ’ could have been
more elated. In one of his case note-books which has
been preserved, he has drawn numerous pictures of the
organism, especially of one amoeba which on March 24th
was watched for many hours and of which there is a suc-
cession of sketches showing its changes in contour. Two
days later he wrote enthusiastically to Musser :

When are you coming down ? MacDonald of Montreal will be
here towards the end of the week. Could you not come & take
dinner with us & stay the night — always a room ready. We have
been much excited over Kartulis’ amoebae which we have found in
a liver abscess from a case of dysentery — a Dr. from Panama. They

Aet. 40 A Discovery of Amoebae 3 27

are most extraordinary & striking creatures & take one’s breath
away at first to see these big amoebae — 10-20 times the size of a
leucocyte — crawling about in the pus. The movements are very
active & in one case kept up for 10 hours. I get a fresh stock of pus
from the drainage tube every day so if you could run down some
eve. we could look for the creatures in the morning. Koch & Kartulis
found them constantly in the stools and bases of the ulcers in Egyptian
dysentery Sc the latter in the liver abscesses. Keep an eye on your
Blockley dysenteries as it would be most interesting to find similar
bodies in our dysenteries. I am off on April 26th by Etruria. Very
busy — I go north for Easter — few days.

An account of this observation was promptly written up
and appeared in an early number of the Bulletin} It was the
first confirmation in English-speaking countries of observa-
tions made by an Athenian, Kartulis, who had been stimu-
lated to make studies of dysentery in Greece following
upon the discovery by Koch during his sojourn in Egypt
in 1883 with the Cholera Commission, that amoebae were
occasionally to be found in the intestines of persons dead
of dysentery. Up to this time a good deal of doubt had
been cast upon the conclusions of Kartulis, for many had
regarded the amoebae as secondary invaders, so that the
discovery of the parasites in the liver abscess Osier regarded
as the first important observation made on the medical
service. Late in 1913? when preparing for the address,
already much quoted from, in which he gave a summary
of his life as a clinical teacher,^ he wrote certain sections
not included in the article when printed. One of them
refers to this discovery and its sequel, as follows :

Familiar with the various forms of amoebae, the opportunity
appeared to be an important one for the study of a disease which
was widely prevalent. We very soon had other opportunities, and
within a few weeks Dr. Lafleur demonstrated their presence in
a local case. In the same year the amoebae were demonstrated by
Dr. Charles Simon in a case in the wards, in which the abscess had
perforated the lung. The disease was found to be common, and
Dr. Councilman in the Pathological Department, and Dr. Lafleur —
then first Assistant in the Medical Clinique — issued in Vol. II of the
Johns Hopkins Hospital Reports for 1890 the monograph on the
subject which still remains the most exhaustive contribution in

^ Johns Hof kins Hospital Bulletin, 1890, i. 53.

* ‘ The Medical Clinic.’ British Medical Journal, Jan. 3, 1914.

328 The Johns Hopkins Hospital May 1890

English, and at once convinced both pathologists and clinicians of
the specific nature of this type of the disease. Many subsequent
reports are to be found scattered through the Bulletins, one of the
most interesting of which was the disclosure by Dr. Flexner of
the presence of the amoebae in an abscess of the jaw. The hepato-
pulmonary abscess — of which we had a great many cases — was made
the subject of a careful study by Dr. Futcher.

During all this time he had a sufficient reason for running
over to Philadelphia when opportunity permitted, even
had he not been called there frequently to participate in
some function or other. One such occasion took him,
a few days before his sailing, to the College of Physicians,
where he gave an address ^ in connexion with the pre-
sentation to the College of the portrait of Weir Mitchell,
its recent President, than whom, as Osier said, no member
of the profession in his generation had more pleasurably
^ warmed both hands before the fire of life \

Reference has repeatedly been made to Osier’s habit of
note-taking, and a number of his pocket commonplace-
books filled with abundant jottings on topics of all sorts,
written in pencil and now for the most part illegible, are
in existence. It was a habit that he strongly recommended
to his students as one of the three essentials in their educa-
tion :

Given the sacred hunger and proper preliminary training, the
student-practitioner requires at least three things with which to
stimulate and maintain his education, a note-book, a library, and
a quinquennial brain-dusting. I wish I had time to speak of the
value of note-taking. You can do nothing as a student in practice
without it. Carry a small note-book which will fit into your waistcoat
pocket, and never ask a new patient a question without note-book
and pencil in hand. After the examination of a pneumonia case
two minutes will suffice to record the essentials in the daily progress.
Routine and system, when once made a habit, facilitate work, and
the busier you are the more time you will have to make observa-
tions. . . . Begin early to make a three-fold category — clear cases,
doubtful cases, mistakes. And learn to play the game fair, no self-
deception, no shrinking from the truth ; mercy and consideration
for the other man, but none for yourself, upon whom you have to
keep an incessant watch. You remember Lincoln’s famous mot about
the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time. It does

^ Cf. the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, June 1890, i. 64.

Aet. 40 The Value of Note-taking 329

not hold good for the individual, who can fool himself to his heart’s
content all of the time. If necessary, be cruel ; use the knife and the
cautery to cure the intumescence and moral necrosis which you
will feel in the posterior parietal region, in Gall and Spurzheim’s
centre of self-esteem, where you will find a sore spot after you have
made a mistake in diagnosis. It is only by getting your cases grouped
in this way that you can make any real progress in your post-collegiate
education ; only in this way can you gain wisdom with experience.
It IS a common error to think that the more a doctor sees the greater
his experience and the more he knows. No one ever drew a more
skilful distinction than Cowper in his oft-quoted lines, which I am
never tired of repeating to a medical audience :

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,

Have oft-times no connexion. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men ;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much ;

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.^

During the course of the quinquennial brain-dusting
v^hich he took this summer, one of these student note-
books was kept. It is filled with the usual miscellany,
though for the most part with notes such as any careful
observer might have made of clinics which he had attended.
A typical continental Studienreise was taken during which
he enjoyed the companionship of Ramsay Wright, whose
purpose was to study museum methods, in view of the
recent destruction by fire of the University of Toronto
Museum. They decided on Freiburg as a starting-point,
reached there May 17th, saw the new surgical theatre,
visited Weismann and also Wiedersheim the comparative
anatomist, spent a pleasant evening with Ziegler, Kahlden
and others at a Kneipe ; and on the next day, a Sunday,
they went to Titi-See, climbed the Feldberg and dined on
the top, without, alas, the promised view of the Swiss moun-
tains. They went on to Basel and Berne, where Osier was
interested in the number of women students attending the
classes of Langhans and Sahli. One was discovered to be
immersed in a Tauchnitz novel during the lecture, and
Osier notes that he did not see one who looked likely to

^ Osier : ^ The Student Life.’ No. XX in ‘ Aequanimitas and other
Addresses ’.

330 The European Clinics May-June 1890

become the Trotula of the twentieth century. Then
Zurich and Munich, where, being Whitsuntide, the univer-
sity laboratories were deserted ; and as every one seemed
to be going to Oberammergau for the Passion Play they
followed suit and were fortunate to discover a bedroom of
sorts in the Wittelsbacher Hof, since tickets for the play
— ^which Osier described as ‘frightfully realistic’ — ^were
allotted to the beds in the village. From Munich they
went to Erlangen, principally to visit Strumpell and
Zenker ; and Osier notes : ‘ The university is Erlangen —
practically there is nothing else in the little Bavarian town,
which forcibly illustrates the great truth that men make
a seat of learning, and if given proper facilities will attract
students.’ Then Wurzburg, where a visit to KoUiker
impressed him so much that he notes : ‘ The type of
a senior Professor which might well be more common, —
the intellectual digestion usually gets feeble after the
crise de quarante ans and new methods are assimilated with
difficulty. A man however who has brought out within
a month or so the first part of a new edition of his General
Embryology 25 years after the last edition cannot be called
old, although he may have reached the Psalmist’s limit.
Nothing is more inspiring than to see a veteran in the van.’
En route to Heidelberg they had some hours in Frankfurt
with Edinger, and with Weigert, whom Osier had known
in Leipzig and who was found busy with a new stain for
neuroglia. Heidelberg was described as ‘ too alluring to
spend much time in hospitals or laboratories ’, and yielding
to the seduction of the place they spent some days in
long walks over the hills, their evenings zum Perkeo, &c.
Professor Wright recalls that —

W. O. felt the romance of every nook and corner of the place.
On one of these outings, Sunday June ist, a gypsy caravan passed
us, and our attention was arrested by the beauty of the young girl
who sat on the end of the last van. Later in the day we encountered
the caravan in Neckargemund , the men had been taken in charge
by the police for entering the town without permission, the women
were protesting noisily, and our sympathies were awakened and our
pockets lightened to the extent of a few marks by the tears of the
young beauty — Osier left unfinished a most poetical version of this
incident, beginning : ‘ Upon what trifles depend events of the

Aet 40 Letters to his House Physicians 331

Utmost importance to the individual.’ He evidently intended his
‘ philologically-inclined young cousin Egerton Y. Davis Jr., Instructor
in English in the University of X ’ to join the gypsy band with the
object of acquiring Romany !

From Heidelberg they proceeded to Strasburg, where
they saw Schwalbe the anatomist ; but visits were also
paid to Naunyn’s wards and laboratory, as well as to those
of von Recklinghausen, Hoppe-Seyler, Schmiedeberg, and
Goltz. All this and much more Osier told in a series of
^ Letters to my House Physicians ’ sent in turn to ^ L ’
[Lafleur], ^ T ^ [Toulmin], ^ R ^ [Reese], ^ S ’ [Simon] and
^ H ’ [Hoch], and which were published serially in the
New York and also in the Montreal medical journals of that
year. These long letters contain delightful pen-pictures
of the men and places that were visited, and many of the
things he picked out as worthy of comment find their
reflection in some of the teaching methods which he
subsequently adopted. The last of the letters, written
from Strasburg and sent to August Hoch, ends with the
following paragraph :

Now, as you are in part a Teuton, it may interest you to know
the general impression one gets of the professional work over here.
I should say that the characteristic which stands out in bold relief in
German scientific life is the paramount importance of knowledge
for its own sake. To know certain things thoroughly and to contri-
bute to an increase in our knowledge of them seems to satisfy the
ambition of many of the best minds. The presence in every medical
centre of a class of men devoted to scientific work gives a totally
different aspect to professional aspirations. While with us — and in
England — the young man may start with an ardent desire to devote
his life to science, he is soon dragged into the mill of practice, and
at forty years of age the ‘ guinea stamp ’ is on all his work. His
aspirations and his early years of sacrifice have done him good, but
we are the losers and we miss sadly the leaven which such a class
would bring into our professional life. We need men like Joseph
Leidy and the late John C. Dalton, who, with us yet not^of us, can
look at problems apart from practice and pecuniary considerations.
I have said much in my letters of splendid laboratories and costly
institutes, but to stand agape before the magnificent structures
which adorn so many university towns of Germany and to wonder
how many millions of marks they cost and how they ever could be
paid for, is the sort of admiration which Caliban yielded to Prospero.
Men will pay dear for what they prize dearly, and the true homage

332 The European Clinics june-juty 1890

must be given to the spirit which makes this vast expenditure a neces-
sity. To that Geist the entire world to-day stands debtor, as over
every department of practical knowledge has it silently brooded,
often unrecognized, sometimes when recognized not thanked.
The universities of Germany are her chief glory, and the greatest
boon she can give to us in the New World is to return our young
men infected with the spirit of earnestness and with the love of
thoroughness which characterizes the work done in them.

The last three weeks in June were spent in Paris, and the
note-book gives picturesque accounts of their doings there,
which began with a visit to Laveran at the Salpetriere.
They saw Dejerine, Debove, Bouchard, Charcot, Hayem,
Straus, and Luys ; and Dejerine’s lectures he particularly
recommended. Hypnotism was very much to the fore at
this time, and there is a long account of a clinic before
a crowded amphitheatre — described as ‘ a regular circus ’ —
given by Luys at the Charite. They were living meanwhile
near the Pasteur Institute and often attended Pasteur’s
hydrophobia inoculations which were held in the early
afternoons.^ They met MetchnikofF, Richet, and Cornil
and attended some of their lectures, as well as those of
other celebrities like Renan, who was lecturing on the
Book of Daniel, and Quatrefages, who gave an active and
well-studied attack on Darwinism such as might have been
expected in the ’6o’s. So the days passed, and in early
July after one of the worst possible Channel crossings they
parted in England, to meet again later on in Berlin. While
in London he saw, of course, all his London friends and
spent a promised week-end with the Schafers, then living
at Croxley Green, Hertfordshire. The following incidents,
among many others, remain stamped on Sir Edward’s
memory :

A good many years ago — about 1890 — when I was in London,
I happened to be walking with Osier in the West End during one
of his visits from the other side, and as we were passing a bootmaker’s
he said : ‘ Come along in here a moment, I want to see an old
friend.’ The proprietor, an elderly gentleman, was standing with

^ In his introducdon to the English edition (Constable & Co ) of the
‘ Life of Pasteur ’ which Osier wrote at the request of Mr. Phipps m 191 1, he
refers to these demonstrations by ‘ the Great Master ’, though, as often in
mentioning dates, he was casual and got them incorrect.

Aet. 41 The Croxley Green Beech-tree 333

his back to us : Osier went up, slapped him on the back and ex-
claimed : ^ Hullo, old boy, how have you been all this time ? ’
The ^ old boy ’ had been his bootmaker when he first came to work
in London in the early ’70’s — and the meeting was like that of two
old friends. ... It was nearly always fine summer weather when he
made his numerous visits to us in one or other of our country houses
in Hertfordshire, and we generally lazed away the hours of the
Sunday on the grass or in lounge chairs, doing nothing particular
and doing that remarkably well. But on one occasion at Croxley
Green he had a fit of activity, spending a great part of the afternoon
in carving ‘ W. O,’ and the date in large characters on a fine young
beech-tree standing in a charming copse close to our house. I expect
the inscription is there to this day, but it is many years since we
left the neighbourhood. Next time I go I will try and find the tree .*
no doubt the inscription will be there still.

It Still is ; but the tree is now a monarch. Much the
same boyish impulse had made him scratch his initials on
the window-pane of the rectory at Weston. Had he
chanced to cut James BovelPs initials instead of his own
during this ^ fit of activity ’ Professor Schafer might well
have been mystified. In reality lazing away hours was not
Osier’s role ; he had small powers of keeping still and
shortly he is found in Birmingham for the annual meeting
of the British Medical Association, not a particularly
stirring occasion, from all accounts. And a week later —
evidently reading a volume of Lamb’s poems rouU — he
joined Ramsay Wright again in Berlin for the Xth Inter-
national Medical Congress, of which Virchow, Bergmann
the surgeon, and Waldeyer the anatomist comprised the
Committee of Organization. To them, after the fiasco
of the IXth Congress in Washington, had been given the
task of putting these important gatherings again on their
feet.^ Virchow’s name was not only known to science the

^ Osier’s attendance was more or less obligatory, for with Jacobi, Welch,
Fitz, Pepper, James Stewart and others he was officially a member of the
American Committee. Any one unfamiliar with the workings of these great
assemblies can hardly over-estimate the enormous amount of detailed work
the Committee of Organization for months ahead was called upon to perform.
At this gathering, for example, there were 8,831 registrants, fifty nationalities
being represented, and 600 communications from selected readers were given
before one or another of the twenty separate sections representing special
subdivisions of medicine.

Aet. 41 The much-loved Jack Hewetson 335

who is a model worker of unequalled thoroughness, whose ways and
methods have always been those of the patient investigator, well
worthy of the confidence which other experts in pathology place
in his statements. The cold test of time can alone determine how
far the claims which he has now advanced will be justified, and
meanwhile the question has been transferred, so far as human
medicine is concerned, from the laboratory to the clinical ward,
in which the careful observations of the next few months will furnish
the necessary data, upon which to found a final judgement.^

By this time or soon after, the Hopkins staff had been
augmented by the appointment of A. A. Ghriskey, D.
Meredith Reese, C. E. Simon, August Hoch, W. H.
Baltzell, W. S. Thayer, Simon Flexner, George H. F.
Nuttall, W. W. Russell and others ; and early the next
spring came a young McGill graduate, the much-lamented
^ Jack ’ Hewetson, whom Osier loved as a son. Even
Hewetson, however, did not escape from his practical jokes,
and not long after his advent Osier sent him over to Phila-
delphia to look up something in the library of the College
of Physicians, saying in an off-hand way as he was leaving :

^ Do drop in on my old friends Philip Syng Physick, and
Shippen, and give them my love.’ Hewetson, who could
not have been expected to know much of the worthies of
Philadelphia’s medical history, nor of the characteristics of
his new Chief, spent most of his afternoon in Philadelphia
trying to locate Drs. Physick and Shippen, and it was not
until his return that he learned they belonged to the past.
Poor Hewetson made a long and losing fight against tuber-
culosis and after his death in 1910 Osier in a memorial
notice ^ gave the following picture of these early days :

The men of the first few years of the existence of this hospital
formed a very happy band — young and eager, with a great problem
before them, too great, indeed, to be fully appreciated by us. It
was a motley group that the gift of a new Foundation in medicine
had brought together, strangers to each other, strangers in a strange
city ; yet there was something in the air, and something in the

Tuberculosis Deutsche medizimsche Wochenschnft, Nov. 14, 1890. Even
in this article he withheld the nature of the substance (tuberculin) which was
called Koch’s lymph.

^ Johns Hophns Hospital Bulletin^ Dec. 1890, i. 108.

^ Ibid.f 1910, xxi. 357.

336 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Autumn 1890

spirit of the place, that quickly ripened a mutual trust into good
fellowship. The Mead’ already given by that great triumvirate
Martin, Remsen and Welch, with Mr. Gdman’s strong personality
and intense interest in the hospital, made the running comparatively
easy. It has often been remarked that the reputation of the Johns
Hopkins Medical School has been made by its young men, to which
I may note incidentally my shelves bear weighty testimony in the
twelve volumes with the 500 papers of the graduates of the school
during the first eight years. . . .In 1891 there came to us, probably
through the influence of Lafleur, John Hewetson from McGill who
had just finished a term of residence at the Montreal General
Hospital. I have just had the sad news of his death, and wish to pay
a brief tribute to his memory. Long practice has given me a fair
control of my vasomotors, but my grip has never been sure when
a letter or some incident brought suddenly to my mind the tragedy
of the life of ‘ Jack ’ Hewetson. As I write there comes the far-away
vision of a young face, frank and open, with the grey-blue eyes that
looked so true, and a voice to match, with a merry laugh — no wonder
that everyone loved him ! Three happy years he lived with us,
growing into a strong, earnest worker, and contributing with Dr.
Thayer an important monograph on malaria, and many minor
papers. Frank Smith and Barker, who joined the staff about the
same time, became his devoted friends. The controller, Mr. Winder
Emery, at once fell under his spell, and it was touching to see the
affection with which the stern old martinet regarded the younger
man. In 1894 Hewetson went to Germany, and in Leipzig
appeared the signs of pulmonary tuberculosis. He had had a pleurisy
in Montreal, and the disease made rapid progress. He returned to
California, where his father lived, and began to fight the long and
losing battle which has just ended. Brave and cheerful, never
repining, even in his broken life, he had much happiness — happiness
that comes with a devoted wife and faithful friends. We who loved
him in those early days have never recovered from the tragedy of
the wreck of a career of such peculiar promise.

An elaborate schedule had been worked out for the
winter courses, which attracted a large number of post-
graduate students. The Monday-evening meetings were
got under way. Osier presiding at the medical meetings
and vying with Welch and Kelly in being the moving spirit
of the Historical Club. The first meeting, formally to
organize this club, at which Osier presided, was held on
November loth, when Welch was elected President for the
year. Osier expressed his intention of briefly reviewing at
subsequent meetings ^ the essays, monographs, and works

Aet.4i In Pursuit of Beaumont 337

of American authors which might be called American
Medical Classics, and which have influenced most markedly
the progress of medicine in this country ’ — a pursuit which
accounts for a series of letters to Dr. Baumgarten of
St. Louis, one of his friends in the Association of American
Physicians. Thus on September 27th :

I was very sorry to miss you and the meeting at Washington this
spring ; but I have been on a delightful jaunt to Europe. I want to
bother you for a few minutes. Do you know anything about Beau-
mont, the army surgeon and gastric physiologist, who died in St,
Louis in 1853 ? Has he relatives in the city with whom I could
communicate? I want certain details of his life which are not
given in St. Louis M. & S. J. 1854, ^ want particularly a photo-

graph or portrait. I know they have called a mushroom school
after his name & I dare say that without too much trouble you
could put me in communication with persons who know all about
him. [And again on October 3rd] Thanks very much for your
prompt reply. I have written to Mrs. Kaim, asking for details
about her father, for whose memory, these many years, I have had
the deepest respect. Judge Baby has promised me full details with
reference to the last days of St. Martin (Beaumont’s subject) who
died only a few years ago. I have a photograph of the old sinner,
in his eighty-second year, and I shall at an early date make it a text
for a short account at our hospital Medical Society, of the life and
work of Beaumont, Welch has just returned. Councilman is on
the sea. Lafleur is In the woods enjoying a well earned holiday
after four months’ hard work in my absence. I suppose there is no
chance of seeing you before our next meeting; but should you
come East remember I always have a room at my house at your
disposal or my room at the hospital.

But this sort of thing was purely avocational : what
really was occupying his time was the further pursuit of the
malarial plasmodium, a form of sport with which not only
his residential staff had become infected, but also chance
visitors like Joseph Leidy, Jr., to whom he wrote on Novem-
ber 29th :

Dear Leidy, Those cases are most interesting — I am sure Laveran’s
organisms will be of the greatest benefit for diagnosis. . . , Look at
night with the stimulating warmth of an Argand Burner 3 c 1/12 im.
at those rounded pigmented bodies & the crescents Ghriskey has
been demonstrating with such care — ^the development of the flagellate
forms, such a show as it makes. It takes away one’s breath to see from
these [drawing inserted] shaped bodies, apparently free, & resembling

2923 I 2

338 The Johns Hopkins Hospital Nov.-Dee. 1890

in general appearance the crescents — long flagella develop unier
the eye. Come down again soon, some Sunday — I shall not be in
Philadelphia again until Xmas.

But his evenings were not entirely given over to the
stimulating warmth of an Argand burner, for he had again
been ‘ bedevilled ’ into the promise of a contribution for
Pepper’s projected two-volume ‘ Theory and Practice of
Medicine ’ ^ at this very time, while he himself was almost
persuaded to undertake an even more ambitious task, in
which he was to cover single-handed the whole field of
medicine.

^ Tliis was publislied 1893-4, Osier’s chapters being on Organic Diseases
of the Erain, Diseases of the Nerves, Diseases of the Muscles, Vasomotor and
Trophic Disorders, Diseases of the Blood, and Diseases of the Ductless
Glands — 187 pages in all.

CHAPTER XIV

1891-2

THE TEXT-BOOK AND AFTER

The larger part of the year 1891 was given over by Osier
to the writing of his magnum opus — ^The Principles and
Practice of Medicine. Whether he would have under-
taken the task had he realized what burdens, in the way of
successive editions, its extraordinary success would impose
upon him for the remainder of his life, is a conjecture not
worth wasting time over. It was certainly then or never.
The university was in serious financial straits owing to the
depreciation of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shares
with which Mr. Hopkins had endowed it, and though this
misfortune did not seriously hamper the hospital it post-
poned indefinitely any idea of erecting a medical school,
which was primarily a university affair. Disappointing to
all, as this was, it furnished the necessary freedom for a long
consecutive piece of writing. The hospital was in smooth
running order and much of the work could be delegated
to his capable juniors : furthermore, serious interruptions
were unlikely, for consultations were few and general
practice forsworn.

There was need of a new students’ treatise on general
medicine. For nearly forty years Watson’s justly celebrated
‘Practice’, first published in 1843, had successfully held
the field against all rivals, and these were many, but the
book was now out of date.^ There had been, to be sure,
no lack of competitors, eminent men too, whose volumes
Osier had taken pains to review,^ but all these efforts had

^ Sir Thomas Watson had recently died at the age of ninety, ‘ wearing the
white flower of a blameless life as Osier wrote in a characteristic obituary
notice sent to the Canadian Practitioner. He had succeeded Francis Hawkins
as Professor of Medicine m King’s College in 1836, and shortly afterwards
delivered the immortal ‘ Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic
which made his text-book a classic.

^ Three of them — by Nathan S. Davis, by Alfred L. Loomis, and by
John S. Bristowe — ^had appeared shortly before Osier’s review, entitled
‘ Recent Works on Practice in the American Journal of the Medical
Sciences, 1885, ixxxix. 175.

The Text-book and After

340

Jan. 1891

been short lived. He had, moreover, written chapters for
some of the large Systems or Encyclopaedias of Medicine,
like those edited by Pepper and by Keating, and was par-
ticipating in another of the kind, so that he knew what
was required ; he had persistently kept up with the current
literature of his subject through the agency of the journal
clubs which dogged his steps in Montreal and Philadelphia ;
and by his constant reviews and editorials he not only had
come to possess an unusual familiarity with medical progress
in nearly all departments, but had acquired facility and style
in the expression of his thoughts. His pathological training
had been such as to make possible, from first-hand know-
ledge, vivid descriptions of the morbid anatomy of disease
in a way unusual for a clinician. He had a great fondness
for medical history and its heroes, and for the allusions to
medicine which occur in general literature. His only weak
spot was in therapeutics, if a healthy scepticism concerning
drugs may be regarded as a weakness.

He was, all things considered, extraordinarily well
equipped to undertake the task. The one ‘ weakness ’
which has been mentioned proved in a curious way, as will
be seen, an unexpected and most important service to
medicine in general. For it led, in an indirect way,
to the rescue of the hospital from its financial embarrass-
ment after the Baltimore fire in 1903 ; to the establishment
of the Rockefeller Institute a few years later ; and, finally,
to the incalculable benefit to humanity which the General
Education Board has rendered with Mr. Rockefeller’s
money, owing to its interest in the prevention and cure
of disease. Indeed, the present position of his colleague
Welch, as Director of the Institute of Hygiene, is remotely
due to the fact that Osier set himself thirty years before to
write a text-book of Medicine, and, as Falconer Madan
said years later, ‘ succeeded in making a scientific treatise
literature On the fly-leaves of the interleaved copy
finally sent him by his publishers when the work was
finished. Osier penned the following statement of how the
book had been written :

On several occasions, in Philadelphia, I was asked by Lea Bros,
to prepare a work on Diagnosis, and had half promised one ; indeed

Aet.4i The Story in Brief 341

I had prepared a couple of chapters, but continually procrastinated
on the plea that up to the 40th year a man was fit for better things
than text-books. Time went on and as I crossed this date I began
to feel that the energy and persistence necessary for the task were
lacking. In September 1890 I returned from a four months’ trip
in Europe, shook myself, and towards the end of the month began
a work on Practice. I had nearly finished the chapter on Typhoid
Fever when Dr. Granger, Messrs. Appleton’s agent, came from
New York to ask me to prepare a Text-book on Medicine. We
haggled for a few weeks about terms and finally, selling my brains
to the devil, I signed the contract. My intention had been to
publish the work myself and have Lippincott or Blakiston (both of
whom offered) handle the book, but the bait of a guaranteed circula-
tion of 10,000 copies in two years and fifteen hundred dollars on
the date of publication was too glittering, and I was hooked. October,
November, and December were not very satisfactory months, and
January 1st, 1891, saw the infectious diseases scarcely completed.

I then got well into harness. Three mornings of each week I stayed
at home and dictated from 8 a.m. to i p.m. On the alternate days
I dictated after the morning Hospital visit, beginning about 1 1.30 a.m.
The spare hours of the afternoon were devoted to correction and
reference work. Early in May I gave up the house, 209 Monument
St., and went to my rooms at the Hospital. The routine there
was : — 8 a.m. to i p.m. dictation ; 2 p.m. visit to the private patients
and special cases in the wards, after which revision, etc. After
5 p.m. I saw my outside cases ; dinner at the club about 6.30,
loafed until 9.30, bed at 10 p.m., up at 7 a.m. I had arranged to
send MS. by ist of July and on that date I forwarded five sections,
but the publishers did not begin to print until the middle of August.
The first two weeks of August I spent in Toronto, and then with
the same routine I practically finished the MS. by about October
the 15th. During the summer the entire MS. was carefully revised
for the press by Mr, Powell of the English Department of the
University. The last three months of 1891 were devoted to proof
reading. In January I made out the index, and in the entire work
nothing so wearied me as the verifying of every reference. Without
the help of Lafleur and Thayer, who took the ward work off my hands,
I never could have finished in so short a time. My other assistants
also rendered much aid in looking up references and special points.
During the writing of the work I lost only one afternoon through
transient indisposition, and never a night’s rest. Between September,
1890, and January, 1892, I gained nearly eight pounds in weight.

During all these months of composition Osier’s clinical
duties were by no means neglected. An instalment of
Koch’s tuberculin had been sent in December to John S.

342 The Text-book and After Feb. 1891

B illin gs, who had turned it over to Welch for the hospital
use, and, though Osier soon wrote, ‘ I am afraid that in
pulmonary tuberculosis we are going to be disappointed
a full report of the selected cases in which it was being
tried under the supervision of Lafleur, Reese, and Hoch
was issued in January. On February 22nd, only three days
before he ‘ sold his brains to the devil ’ and signed the
contract with Appleton’s agent, the fifteenth anniversary
of the university was held. Osier giving the main address,
on ‘ Recent Advances in Medicine This being an occa-
sion when local public officials meet with the university,
Osier, doubtless with the notoriously unsanitary conditions
which then existed in Baltimore in his mind, laid stress
on the movement towards the prevention of disease through
sanitary science, in which the profession ‘ requires and can
often obtain the intelligent co-operation of city authorities
and the public ’, pointing out that ‘ clean streets, good
drains and pure water have in many towns reduced the
mortality from certain diseases fifty per cent.’ He dwelt
also on the new knowledge relating to the agents producing
disease and how it had revolutionized the practice of
surgery through the same methods of bacterial cleanliness
that should be applied to prevent the infection of cities.
He emphasized as a third great advance the diffusion among
the public of more rational ideas concerning the treat-
ment of disease, stating as an interesting psychological
fact that ‘ the desire to take medicine is perhaps the
greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals ’.

Of one "thing [he said] I must complain, — that when we of the pro-
fession have gradually emancipated ourselves from a routine adminis-
tration of nauseous mixtures on every possible occasion, and when we
are able to say, without fear of dismissal, that a little more exercise,
a little less food, and a little less tobacco and alcohol, may possibly
meet the indications of the case — I say it is a just cause of complaint
that when we, the priests, have left off the worship of Baal, and
have deserted the groves and high places, and have sworn allegiance
to the true god of science, that you, the people, should wander off
after all manner of idols, and delight more and more in patent
medicine, and be more than ever in the hands of advertising quacks.

^ Cf. Science, N.Y., 1891, xvii. 170.

Aet.4i The Medical and Chirurgical Faculty 343

But for a time it must be so. This is yet the childhood of the world,
and a supine credulity is still the most charming characteristic
of man.

The weekly Medical Society meetings continued to be
held during the year, with Osier in the chair ; and the
interesting reports in the hospital Bulletin of the proceed-
ings on these Monday evenings, before small groups of
some thirty or forty people, members of the house staff
and graduate students, furnish most interesting reading.
The monthly meetings of the Historical Club, always less
well attended, he never missed, and rarely failed to con-
tribute something, though his communications were not
always published.’- Nor was there any neglect of teaching,
for it is evident from the elaborate schedule of exercises
that the hours were as full as would have been the case had
the undergraduate school been in operation. He kept up
with his weekly clinics from October to May, gave a pre-
scribed series of afternoon lectures, and meanwhile his
output of papers, though fewer in number than in preceding
years, was nevertheless considerable.

There was probably no one feature of his life in Phila-
delphia at first more greatly missed than his intimate
relations with the College of Physicians and its superb
library. In Baltimore the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty,
before which body he had given his ‘ Licence to Practise ’
address in 1889, bore the same titular relation to the local
profession as did the College of Physicians of Philadelphia ;
but it was a dormant body which possessed at this time
a few hundred dusty volumes of the mid-century vintage,
housed in the basement of the Maryland Historical Society.
The rejuvenescence of this respectable and aged society,
which to aU appearances had passed into a hopeless dotage,
is almost wholly attributable to Osier’s interest and actmty.
In this year, 1891, he volunteered to go on the library com-
mittee, and continued to serve in this capacity until the

^ On Jan. 12th he gave abstracts from John Jones’s ‘ Manual of Sutgerf
1776, with a review of the life of this interesting Marylander. On Feb. 9th
he gave an account of the introduction of Aspiration for Pleurisy. On Oct.
I2th his topic was ‘ Nathan Smith and his Treatment of Typhus (now
Typhoid) Fever ’.

344 The Text-book and After Feb.-Mar. 1891

end of his Baltimore period in 1905, the ‘ Faculty ’ during
the interval having made two migrations, each time to
better quarters, while its library expanded from the original
small nucleus to a collection of nearly 15,000 volumes. As
an element in this renaissance he succeeded the following
year in getting a trained librarian appointed, Miss Marcia C.
Noyes, who has given her own account ^ of Osier’s great
services, behind the scenes as they often were, and which
by no means ended with his departure for England. His
interest in libraries was cumulative, and a contact once
made was never subsequently lost. As will be seen, the
library at McGill, that of the Surgeon-General in Wash-
ington, of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, of the
Johns Hopkins Hospital, of this Maryland Faculty, and
many others which he perhaps knew less intimately, all
continued to profit by his unflagging support — moral and
often financial. Nor was his interest confined wholly to
medical libraries. But not even his supreme delight in
the Bodleian, of which he became a Curator in his later
years, effaced in the slightest his zeal for the libraries and
librarians known to his earlier days. Like others, he realized
the desirability of drawing people with common interests
together, but few have been gifted with a genius equal to
his of bringing about such combinations, and almost wholly
through his personal backing the Medical Library Associa-
tion, which has done such important work for the profession,
was founded at about this time. At the opening of the
new building of the Boston Medical Library a few years
later he made the following confession :

It is hard for me to speak of the value of libraries in terms which
would not seem exaggerated. Books have been my delight these
thirty years, and from them I have received incalculable benefits.
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an
uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go
to sea at aU. Only a maker of books can appreciate the labours of
others at their true value. Those of us who have brought forth fat
volumes should ofier hecatombs at these shrines of Minerva Medica.

^ ‘Osier’s Influences on the Library of the Medical and Chirurgical
Faculty of the State of Maryland.’ Johns Hofhns Hosptd Bulletin, July
1919.

Aet. 41 Libraries and Librarians 345

And he continued :

But when one considers the unending making of books, who does
not sigh for the happy days of that thrice happy Sir William Browne
whose pocket library sufficed for his life’s needs ; drawing from
a Greek Testament his divinity, from the aphorisms of Hippocrates
his medicine ; and from an Elzevir Horace his good sense and
vivacity ? There should be in connection with every library a corps
of instructors in the art of reading, who would, as a labour of love,
teach the young idea how to read. ... For the general practitioner
a welhused library is one of the few correctives of the premature
senility which is so apt to overtake him. Self-centred, self-taught,
he leads a solitary life, and unless his everyday experience is controlled
by careful reading or by the attrition of a medical society it soon
ceases to be of the slightest value and becomes a mere accretion of
isolated facts, without correlation. It is astonishing with how little
reading a doctor can practise medicine, but it is not astonishing how
badly he may do it. Not three months ago a physician living within
an hour’s ride of the Surgeon-General’s Library brought his little
girl, aged twelve, to me. The diagnosis of infantile myxoedema
required only a half-glance. In placid contentment he had been
practising twenty years in ‘ Sleepy Hollow ’ and not even when his
own flesh and blood was touched did he rouse from an apathy deep
as Rip Van Winkle’s sleep. In reply to questions : No, he had never
seen anything in the journals about the thyroid gland ; he had seen
no pictures of cretinism or myxoedema ; in fact his mind was a blank
on the whole subject. He had not been a reader, he said, but he
was a practical man with very little time. I could not help thinking
of John Bunyan’s remarks on the elements of success in the practice
of medicine. . .

But Osier’s relations to the Maryland Medical and
Chirurgical Faculty were by* no means restricted to the
upbuilding of its library. At the annual meeting on
April 3©th of this year, in the old Hall at the corner of
St. Paul and Saratoga Streets, he gave an address on ^The
Healing of Tuberculosis which may be regarded as the
date of his personal enlistment in the crusade against this
disease — a crusade which demanded, above all else, the
awakening of public opinion from its existing indifference
and ignorance.

Though Osier’s writings had been on a great diversity of
subjects, his bibliography shows a predominance of articles

^ ‘Books and Men’, 1901. Reprinted as No. XII in ‘ Aequanimitas and
other Addresses ’

The Text-book and After

346

Apr. 1891

on typhoid fever, on pneumonia, and on tuberculosis. For
like Virchow, whom he so much admired, he became the
champion of improved public-health measures, national and
local ; and though unlike Virchow he never held public'
office, his time, his pen, and his great personal influence
had almost as much to do with the modern sanitary improve-
ments which Baltimore has come to enjoy, as Virchow’s
influence had to do with those instituted during the ’8o’s
in Berlin. But his vigorous early participation in what has
become a world-wide campaign against tuberculosis must
stand in the forefront of the many public services he
rendered — services which in large measure have been lost
sight of in the maze of his other activities. In spite of
Laennec’s writings early in the century on the curability
of phthisis, it was still a prevalent idea even among the
profession that pulmonary consumption was a hopeless
malady. Osier had seen enough of tuberculosis on the
autopsy tables at the Montreal General as well as at Blockley,
where 52 of his 191 post mortems were made on the fatal
cases of tuberculosis, to appreciate, perhaps better than
any of his contemporaries,^ the ravages of which the disease
was capable.

In spite of this experience, which must have been dis-
couraging enough to breed pessimism in the mind of a less
buoyant individual, his duty as a physician was to inspire
hope not only in his patients but among the profession and
in the community at large. Only a year hence, Meredith
Reese, one of his own house staff, was destined to die of
consumption at Saranac. There, too late, alas, he had gone
to join Trudeau, who for the past fifteen years had been
making his own gallant struggle against the disease in the
Adirondack forests. Nor was Reese, to Osier’s despair, by
any means the only one of the younger members of his staff
whose career in years to come was cut short by tuber-
culosis. In his address, after calling attention to the fact
that the discovery of the tubercle bacillus and its presence

^ He had already published occasional papers on certain aspects of the
subject, the more important of which, however, before the discovery of the
tubercle bacillus, had dealt with a non-infectious form of pulmonary phthisis,
the fibroid or so-called ‘ miner’s ’ variety.

Aet.4i Opening Gun against Tuberculosis 347

in the sputum had not only made an early diagnosis possible,
but had also supplied a proof that many affected individuals
recovered from the disease, and after quoting the maxim
ascribed to Virchow, that every one shows, at last, some
trace of tuberculosis,^ he went on to say :

My attention was called to the point in 1870 by Palmer Howard
of Montreal, who was in the habit of pointing out the great frequency
of puckering at the apices of the lungs in elderly persons. Subse-
quently, when I became Pathologist to the Montreal General
Hospital, we often discussed the significance of these changes, whether
indicative or not of healed phthisis. ... I have carefully reviewed
the records of 1000 post-mortems, dictated in all instances by myself,
with reference to this question. In 216 cases death was caused by
pulmonary tuberculosis. Excluding the simple fibroid puckering,
the local thickening of the pleura, and the solitary caseous or cal-
careous mass, there were among the remaining 784 cases, 59, or
5 05 %, in which persons dying of other diseases presented undoubted
tuberculous lesions in the lungs. . . . These facts demonstrate, first,
the widespread prevalence of tuberculosis ; and secondly, the fact
as shown by my figures, that at least one-fourth of all infected
persons recover spontaneously. In the great majority of these cases
the disease is very limited and has made no progress, and in many
instances could not have given physical signs. But even in more
advanced disease, where the local indications are marked and bacilli
and elastic tissue present in the sputum, arrest is by no means
infrequent, and although post-mortem evidence shows that we are
wrong in speaking of the process as cured^ yet the condition is con-
sistent with comparatively good health. . . . Once infection has
occurred, the chief indication is to place the person in surroundings
favourable to the maintenance of the maximum degree of nutrition.
The influence of environment has never been better illustrated than
by Trudeau’s experiment. Inoculated rabbits, confined in a damp
dark place rapidly succumbed, whilst others allowed to roam at
large either recovered or had slight lesions. It is the same in human

^ With an unerring eye for historical priorities, Osier pointed out in his
essay on Richard Morton read before the Johns Hopkins Historical Club,
January 1900 (published 1904), that Morton had a strong belief in the great
prevalence of tuberculosis of the lungs, for in his ‘ Phthisiologia the first
systematic treatise on consumption, published in 1689, Morton says : ^ Yea,
when I consider with my self how often in one Year there is cause enough
ministered for producing these Swellings, even to those that are wont to
observe the strictest Rules of Living, I cannot sufficiently admire that any
one, at least after he comes to the Flower of his Youth, can dye without
a touch of a Consumption.’ This antedates by 200 years Cohnheim’s and
Virchow’s dictum.

The Text-book and After

348

Apr. 1891

tuberculosis : a patient confined to the house, living in close, over-
heated rooms, or in a stuff7, ill-ventilated dwelling of the poor, or
treated in a hospital ward, is in a position analogous to the rabbit
confined in the cellar; whereas a patient living in fresh air and
sunshine for the greater part of the day has a chance comparable
to that of the rabbit running wild. The very essence of the climatic
treatment of tuberculosis is tmproved nutntion by change of environ-
ment. Fresh air and sunshine are the essentials with which, in com-
parison, altitude is of secondary importance. . .

Meanwhile he was hard at work on his Text-book, and
must have borrowed his old pathological records from the
Montreal General, for, as is known, he made repeated
reference to them in his writing. Evidently they were
inquiring for these records in Montreal, and on April 6th
he wrote as follows to Richard MacDonnell, who had a sister
in the training-school, and who, poor fellow, died an un-
timely death from tuberculosis only three months later :

Dear Mac, — ^To tell you the truth, it would not be very convenient
to part with these volumes just at present for the following reason.
I have, like an idiot, agreed to write a text-book on medicine, and
am about half-way through it. I am drawing a good deal on them
for certain statistical material ; thus the other day, in writing up
mediastinal growths I went over the whole list, looking for my cases
of pulmonary and other thoracic tumours, and also when I come
to the liver and other organs I shall do the same thing. I am very
sorry as I should like to oblige you in this matter, and as I told you,
I shall ultimately put the five volumes in the medical library. There
are several things I wish to consult you about in the matter of the
book. . . . Excuse this miserable typewritten letter. I know you
don’t like any such novelties ; and forgive me also for disappoint-
ing you, pro tern, in the matter of hospital reports. I thought you
were coming down this spring. We should be so glad to see you
and Mrs. MacDonnell, to whom give my kind regards. Your sister
keeps well and seems very happy. . . .

He drew a good deal on the Montreal volumes ^ for
statistical material \ but he also drew even more frequently
from another source for many allusions, and poor ^ Dick ’

^ ‘The Healing of Tuberculosis.’ Climatologist^ Phila., 1892, ii. 149-53.
‘ Osier was perhaps the first to workout the home- treatment of tuberculosis
writes Professor Welch. One of his patients, still living, with whom he
kept up a correspondence till his last days, contracted the disease at this time
and was encouraged to live an outdoor life in a specially-constructed sleeping-
porch.

Aet. 41 The Parable of the Sower 349

MacDonnell may have been in his mind, hoping that ^ the
seed had fallen upon stony ground \ when he utilized the
Parable of the Sower in this paragraph :

In all tubercles two processes go on; the one — caseation —
destructive and dangerous ; and the other — sclerosis — conservative
and healing. The ultimate result in a given case depends upon the
capabilities of the body to restrict and limit the growth of the
bacilli. There are tissue-soils in which the bacilli are, in all pro-
bability, killed at once — has fallen by the wayside. There
are others in which a lodgement is gained and more or less damage
done, but finally the day is with the conservative, protecting forces
— the seed has fallen ufon stony ground. Thirdly, there are tissue-
soils in which the bacilli grow luxuriantly, caseation and softening,
not limitation and sclerosis, prevail, and the day is with the invaders
— the seed has fallen upon good ground.

As stated, he moved into the hospital on May ist, and,
except for a brief interim in August, worked consecutively
on his task until the middle of October, when the manu-
script was finished. The four senior Residents — in medicine,
surgery, gynaecology, and pathology — at the Johns Hopkins
have from the earliest days enjoyed the luxury of a separate
study and bedroom, sparsely furnished though they then
were ; and Hunter Robb, Kelly’s Resident, happened to be
in possession not only of the largest but the quietest suite,
situated at the end of the corridor. It was there that
Osier camped out for the next six months. As Dr. Robb
recalls :

He asked me if I would loan him the use of my library for an hour
or so in the mornings. I of course said, ^ Yes, with great pleasure’.
The first morning, he appeared with one book under his arm accom-
panied by his stenographer. Miss Humpton. When the morning’s
work was over, he left the book on my library desk, wide open with
a marker in it. The next morning he brought two books with him,
and so on for the next two weeks, so that the table and all the chairs
and the sofa and the piano and even the floor was covered with open
books. As a consequence I never was able to use the room for fully
six months. Oftentimes right in the middle of his dictating, he would
stop and rush into my other room, and ask me to match quarters
with him, or we would engage in an exchange of yarns. It was
a great treat for me, and except when he would court inspiration
by kicking my waste-paper basket about the room, I thoroughly
enjoyed his visits.

The Text-book and After

350

May 1891

Dr. Robb does not mention how he was cured of the
paper-basket habit, hy treating it in his usual fashion one
day after it had been weighted with concealed bricks ; but
the fact merely serves to show the degree of informality
that existed between chiefs and residents in those days.
There was also much give and take between the chiefs
themselves, as the following tale from Dr. Welch indicates :

I have told the story so often that I really believe it. The circum-
stances were these: It must have been in 1891 or ’92, and Osier
who was then living on Monument Street had sent to the printer
most of the manuscript of the Practice and galley proof was
beginning to come in. He was closing his house, his books were
packed up or covered or not readily accessible and he was about to
leave for the summer, when he came to my room one evening about
nine o’clock (I was living on Cathedral Street) and asked if he could
look up the subject of ergotism, which he had discovered suddenly
that he had forgotten in the ‘Practice’. (You recall how he has
something to say about everything in the ‘Practice’,) I told him
not to bother, that I had been looking up ergotism and could give
him the latest information. Taking a number of the Deutsche
Med. Wochenschrift I pretended to read him a wonderful descrip-
tion of the disease with startling statistics of its prevalence in south-
eastern Europe and its relation to obscure nervous affections. He
took a pad and jotted down the notes which I gave him. I recall
that I gave him the figures for Roumania. He became greatly
interested, said that he had no doubt that they were overlooking
ergotism every day as a cause of obscure nervous diseases and that
he would put Harry Thomas to work on it in the dispensary.

Off he went with the material for a beautiful article on ergotism,
which would have immortalized the ‘ Practice ’. I did not really
expect him to swallow it, but he did ; and thinking it over I became
uneasy, and early the next morning I confessed the hoax to him,
and took him around a real article on ergotism. He never quite
liked reference to the joke. It was not a very good joke and I am
rather ashamed of it, but the facts really are as I have stated. Like
most practical jokers Osier was easy to fool, or else he was so con-
fiding that he did not think me capable of trying to fool him.

Though the hospital had only been two years in opera-
tion, other schools were beginning to look to it as a source
of supply for young teachers : Abbott had already received
a call to Philadelphia as Director of the new Institute of
Hygiene, and Brockway had gone to Columbia. Calls,
however, did not come to juniors alone, for their chiefs

On the Market

Aet. 41

351

also were in a sense on the market ; and in the midst of
his writing Osier must have been disfurbed hy the receipt
of these two letters and the inevitable parleys which go
with such matters :

To W, O,from Furman Sheppard, Philadelphia, May ir, 1891.

My dear Sir, — A joint Committee, consisting of Ex-Mayor Fitler,
Professor Hobart A. Hare, and the undersigned, has been appointed
by the unanimous action of the Board of Trustees, and of the Faculty, *
of the Jefferson Medical College of this city, to communicate with
you with reference to the vacant Chair of Practice of Medicine and
Clinical Medicine in that institution. We would be much pleased
to have the favour of a personal interview with you, and will gladly
come to Baltimore for that purpose. If, however, you are likely to
be in Philadelphia within a few days, and will kindly advise us to
that effect, we can meet you here if it will be equally convenient and
agreeable to you. We will cheerfully consult your wishes in this
respect. Very Resp^^ Ob* S^*.

To W, 0 , from H, P, BozvdtUh. Harvard Medical School, Boston,

May 15, 1891.

My dear Osier, — Dr. [Francis] Minot has resigned the Chair of
Theory and Practice and we are looking around for a successor.
I suppose there is no more use in trying to induce you to consider
the subject than there was when the Chair of Clinical Medicine
was vacant a few years ago, but still I venture to inquire whether
there are any circumstances under which you would like to come
to Boston and share our work. I think we shall soon adopt a four
years’ graded course and your assistance in organizing the instruction
would be very valuable. There would probably be no difficulty in
getting you a service at one of the hospitals, and it is the feeling
of the Faculty that the teaching of theory and practice should
in the future be much more clinical than it has been in the past.
Drop me a line if possible before next Wednesday as there is
a committee meeting, then, to consider the question. Yours very
sincerely.

But there was another, for him, still more important
consideration, beside which university calls and text-book
writing seemed of little moment. The decision regarding
the calls to Philadelphia and Boston he settled himself;
but this other, a matrimonial one, was settled for him.
The object of his attentions, aware that he was engaged
in writing a book, which he threatened to let ^ go hang
advised the shoemaker, in effect, to stick to his last.

352 The Text-book and After Summer 1891

On June 4th graduated the first class from the Nurses’
Training School, seventeen in all, including a future
Superintendent of the school, who was to be Miss Hampton’s
successor after her marriage with Dr. Robb. Osier gave the
graduating address,^ in which he paid a tribute to the part
his hearers were to play in the great drama of human
suffering, with its inevitable stage accessories of doctor and
nurse :

In one of the lost boohs of Solomon, a touching picture is given
of Eve, then an early grandmother, bending over the little Enoch,
and showing Mahala how to soothe his sufferings and allay his pains.
Woman, ‘ the link among the days and so trained in a bitter school,
has, in successive generations, played the part of Mahala to the
little Enoch; of Elaine to the wounded Lancelot. It seems
a far cry from the plain of Mesopotamia and the lists of Camelot
to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, but the spirit which makes this scene
possible is the same, tempered through the ages by the benign
influence of Christianity. . . . Here we learn to scan gently our brother
man, and — chief test of charity in your sex — still more gently our
sister woman ; judging not, asking no questions, but meting out to
all alike a hospitality worthy of the Hotel-Dieu^ and deeming our-
selves honoured in being allowed to act as its dispensers. Here, too,
are daily before our eyes the problems which have ever perplexed
the human mind ; problems not presented in the dead abstract of
books, but in the living concrete of some poor fellow in his last
round, fighting a brave fight, but sadly weighted, and going to his
account ‘ unhousel’d, disappointed, unaneled, no reckoning made
As we whisper to each other over his bed that the battle is decided
and Euthanasia alone remains, have I not heard in reply to that
muttered proverb, so often on the lips of the physician, ‘ the fathers
have eaten sour grapes your answer, in clear accents, — the com-
forting words of the prayer of Stephen ? . . . Useful your lives shall
be, as you will care for those who cannot care for themselves, and
who need about them, in the day of tribulation, gentle hands
and tender hearts. And happy lives shall be yours, because
busy and useful ; having been initiated into two of the three
mysteries of the Great Secret — that happiness lies in the absorp-
tion in some vocation which satisfies the soul ; that we are here
to add what we can to^ not to get what we can froniy Life ; and
the third, — is still a mystery, which you may or may not learn
hereafter.

According to his terms with Appleton he had finished

^ ‘ Doctor and Nurse,’ No, II in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses

Aet.42 These Infernal Proofs 353

on time the first sections of his book, as is evident from this
line scribbled to J. H. Musser :

Maryland Club, Saturday.

Dear John Musser, Sorry to have left yours of ? unanswered but
everything goes now-a-days. I am on the last lap with that bloom-
ing old book & hope to finish by Aug. ist. Have sent July ist first
batch to printers — all the fevers and am now finishing the nervous
system. How are you ? Do come down for a Sunday. You could
give me some good advice Sc help in one or two matters Sc sugges-
tions why not next Sunday we have a score of interesting cases on
the wards.

Word came from Shepherd on July 31st telling of Richard
MacDonneirs death — ^ the seed had fallen on good ground \
It was a sad business and Osier felt the loss deeply, setting
himself as usual to the prompt payment of an obituary
tribute to his friend of Montreal days. He had promised
to attend a meeting there, shortly, of the Canadian
Medical Association, but this had been given up ; and
though away from time to time, the Text-book held him
for the most part at home, whence issued a succession of
letters expressing impatience over the vexatious delays in
getting his proof. Thus on another Saturday from the
Maryland Club, this undated card to Musser :

Dear Old Man, Shall be so glad to see you — ^looked for you last
Sunday. I am still buried in these infernal proofs. They have been
cruelly slow — only up to about 700 pages but they keep me very
busy. Poor Wilson would have been bitterly disappointed had he
not got the [Jefferson] berth — tho it would have been lovely for
you. I hope to be in Phila one day this week — ^if so I will telegraph
you Sc we might have luncheon together Yours ever, W. O.

The triennial Congress of Physicians and Surgeons had
its second meeting in Washington, September 22-25, under
the presidency of Weir Mitchell, who at this time gave his
much-quoted address on ^ The History of Instrumental
Precision in Medicine h There were two important com-
bined meetings of the several societies comprising the
congress : one of them on the conditions underlying the
infection of wounds, at which Welch was referee and
Roswell Park co-referee ; the other was on the subject of
interstitial scleroses, with Alfred L. Loomis as chief spokes-

A a

2923*1

The Text-book and After

3 54

Sept. 1891

man and Osier co-referee. Though his chief affiliation was
with the Association of Physicians,^ he was a member of
several other special societies as well, and at this time read
not only a paper on ‘ Double Athetosis ’ before the Neuro-
logical Association, but presented two others ^ before
the American Pediatric Society, of which he was elected
President for the ensuing year, to succeed T. M. Rotch
of Boston. Probably no one ever attended one of these
large meetings who enjoyed himself more than did Osier,
for the responsibility of reading papers weighed lightly upon
him. His effervescent spirits and good-fellowship were apt
to make him the life of the social gatherings and dinners,
and the liberties he took with people were so innocent and
apt to be so amusing as never to give offence. One of the
traditional tales of the Neurological Association, which
dates back to the annual dinner of the society at this time,
concerns the ceremonies which accompanied the crowning
of W. W. Keen, a lifelong teetotaler, as the infant Bacchus
while libations were being poured at his feet.

It is doubtful if any physician ever had a wider acquain-
tance among the profession at large, and he had the rare
gift of recalling people’s names and remembering his
association with them, no matter how brief the previous
encounter may have been. His memory for names has been
described as positively uncanny and may possibly be ascribed
in a measure to his early training at Weston, when as head
prefect it was necessary, on the unexpected order from the
head-master, to call the roll of the school from memory to
see if any boy was truant. One of his old McGill students,
who insists that he was an inconspicuous member of a class
in which there was another student of the same name,
relates that never having seen Osier in the interval, he met
him unexpectedly one day in the corridor of the Johns
Hopkins, and said : ‘ Of course you don’t remember me.’

^ Pepper was President of the Association of Physicians for this year, and
paid in his address a glowing tribute to the life and character of Joseph Leidy,
whose death occurred Apiil 30th, and with it the meetings of the Biological
Club ended.

^ ‘ The Diagnosis of Bronchopneumonia from Tuberculosis and ^ The
Association of Congenital Wry-neck with Marked Facial Asymmetry

Aet.42 Virchow's Seventieth Birthday 355

^ Remember you ? ’ said Osier, taking his arm. ^ You’re

Arthur J, MacD , McGill, 1882, Come with me, Pve

something to show you and then we’ll go to lunch.’

On October 13th there was a local celebration in honour
01 Virchow’s seventieth birthday, to coincide with the great
festival being held in Berlin ; and fragments from Osier’s
address,^ reminiscent of his personal association with ‘ the
father of modern pathology ’ have already been given.
Few tributes have ever been paid a member of the medical
profession to equal those paid Virchow at this time, when,
to use Osier’s words : ‘ as the shadows lengthen, and ere
the twilight deepens, it has seemed right to his many
pupils and friends the world over, to show their love by
a gathering in his honour.’ Prophetic words they now seem
to be, for Osier was the next, nigh thirty years later, to
whoiri as a septuagenarian perhaps even more beloved than
Virchow, an equally world-wide tribute was paid. One
great in the Science of Medicine, the other in the Art ;
but it was for something else they were loved, and the
world may wait long for the counterpart of either. The
address concluded with the paragraph :

Surely the contemplation of a life so noble in its aims, so notable
in its achievements, so varied in its pursuits, may well fill us with
admiration for the man and with pride that he is a member of our
profession. The influence of his work has been deep and far-reaching,
and in one way or another has been felt by each one of us. It is
well to acknowledge the debt which we every-day practitioners owe
to the great leaders and workers in the scientific branches of our art.
We dwell too much in corners, and, consumed with the petty cares
of a bread-and-butter struggle, forget that outside our routine lie
Elysian Fields into which we may never have wandered, the tillage
of which is not done by our hands, but the fruits of which we of the
profession (and you of the public) fuUy and freely enjoy. The
lesson which should sink deepest into our hearts is the answer which
a life, such as Virchow’s, gives to those who to-day as in past genera-
tions see only pills and potions in the profession of medicine, and who
utilizing the gains of science fail to appreciate the dignity and the
worth of the methods by which they are attained. As Pausanias
pestered Empedocles, even to the end, for the details of the cure of
Pantheia, so there are with us stiU those who, ‘ asking not wisdom,

^ ‘ Rudolph Virchow • the Man and the Student.’ Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal, Oct 22,1891.

A a 2

356 The Text-book and After Autumn 1891

but drugs to charm with are impatient at the slow progress of
scienccj forgetting that the chaos from which order is now appearing
has been in great part dispelled hj the work of one still living — by
the man whom tonight we delight to honour.

During October, November, and December he was
much occupied with proof-reading of what he lightly
refers to as his ^ quiz compend ’ in this note to Ogden of
November 2nd :

You can just tell Appleton’s drummer to hand back that subscrip-
tion, as, for you^ there is another way to get the volume, and I shall
forward you one of the earliest copies with the greatest pleasure.
Why don’t you send on that paper of yours of Alkaptonuria to the
Medical News. I have a short note on it. I hope to go abroad
myself next spring, and it would be delightful if we could go together.
I have to attend the meeting of the Pediatric Society in May, but
I hope to have the meeting early, so as to get off about the middle
of the month. Should you have to go earlier, we might arrange in
any case to join somewhere, and to take a month’s tramp would be
perfectly delightful. . . . Mercier has a streak of genius. All his
books are good. I have no time for anything but this infernal ‘ quiz
compend the proofs of which I hope to finish by the first of
December.

1892

Osier dedicated his magnum opus, the text of which was
completed by the end of December, as follow^s :

To the

Memory of my Teachers :

WILLIAM ARTHUR JOHNSON,

Priest of the Parish of Weston, Ontario,

JAMES BOVELL,

of the Toronto School of Medicine, and of the
University of Trinity College, Toronto.

ROBERT PALMER HOWARD,

Dean of the Medical Faculty and Professor of Medicine,
McGill University, Montreal.

His prefatory note bears the date of January ist, but the
load was not entirely lifted. This is made evident by the
following note sent the next evening to Lafleur, who in

Aet,42 The Magnum Opus Finished 357

September had resigned from his post as Resident Physician
and returned to Montreal to enter practice :

Dear L. So sorry the Path scheme has fallen thro. ’Twould
have been a great card for the College. Just back from Toronto —
very busy 4 days. Index nearly ready — all proofs in — should be out
in a few weeks. Reese better — now at spital, very thin — has looked
badly, but will improve now I hope. How soon could you leave
for abroad ? I am warned as to date of the Pediatric Soc. — meeting
is some time in May — At the end I fear, which would be too late
for me. I should like to get off earlier. We miss you very much.
I often wish you were back again with us. I am glad a few patients
are dropping in — they will come in time, too many perhaps. Love
to Ross & the brethren. Yours as ever, W. O.

A visit to the North-Italian towns was evidently in
prospect with Ogden and Lafleur as companions, and they
went as far as to book their passages, but it was a plan
not to be fulfilled, for good and sufficient reasons. The
Text-book at last was finished and ready for distribu-
tion, when from the hospital on March 3rd he wrote to
Musser :

Dear Johannes, I shall join you late on Saturday eve. I am
going over to dine with the Bakers and shall come in about ii.
I hope you have had a copy of my compend by this time. I asked
the Appletons to send to the teachers first. I am sorry they cut
out the Index of Authors which I had prepared with great care.
I see about eight references to J. H. M. I have not neglected my
Philadelphia friends — of 1049 references to authors 264 are American.
I had the iioo-odd references in Fagge ^ overhauled Sc found 36
American, so that I have a more even division. Yours ever, W. O.

As no copy of the first printing used to stand on the
shelves in Osier’s library it is presumable that his may have
gone to the lady who had told him to ^ stick to his last
She was visiting friends in Baltimore at the time, and he
appeared, it is said, with a big red book under his arm,
which was tossed in her lap with the words : ^ There^ take

^ The third edition of Fagge and Pye-Smith’s ‘ Principles and Practice of
Medicine 2 vols., London, 1892, had just been published.

2 Grace Linzee Revere, h. June 19, 1854, daughter of John Revere
and Susan Tilden (Torrey) Revere, both of Boston ; m. Dr. S. W. Gross
of Phila., Dec, 1876.

358 The Text-book and After Spring 1892

the darn thing ; now what are you going to do with the
man ? ’ The distribution of a few other presentation copies
of less moment was doubtless attended to by the publishers,
and one of them of course went to Mr. Gilman, who
admitted in his letter of acknowledgement that the volume
had kept him up late. ^ I find the record of all that I have
ever felt and of all that I expect to encounter as I walk
through life with your vade mecum in my overcoat he
wrote ; adding, ^ When I see the evidences of science and
art which are enlisted in the service of the hospital I can
hardly be patient with the delays in starting the School of
Medicine.’ Not until the second printing, which was
necessitated within two months by the unprecedented sale
of the book, did he have abundant copies to distribute
among his friends, as well as an interleaved one to retain
himself, on the fly-leaf of which he wrote :

Received first copy Feb. 24th3 1892. This one — April i6th, 1892.
This is the 2nd printing, with some of the errors corrected. The
1st printing of 3,000 copies was distributed by March 17th, on which
date I had notice from Appleton & Co. to send corrections for 2nd
printing. Private Copy, May all the curses of the good Bishop
Ernulphus light on the borrower-and-not-returner or upon the
stealer of this book.

And in the copy he left in Hunter Robb’s room was
written :

N. B. This book was conceived in robbery and brought forth
in fraud. In the spring of 1891 I coolly entered in & took posses-
sion of the working room of Dr. Hunter Robb — popularly known as
the Robin, As in the old stor^ of the Cookoo & the hedge sparrow
I just turned him out of his comfortable nest, besplattered his floor
with pamphlets papers & trash & played the devil generally with
his comfort. In spite of the vilest treatment on my part he rarely
failed to have oranges in his cupboard, chocolates &c (yum ! yum !)
on his table & gingerale & ‘ Old Tom ’ on the sideboard. In moments
of contrition I feel how sadly he has suffered — and as this is one of
those rare occasions I have taken advantage of it & make here my
public confessions to him. Signed on behalf of the Author

4/21/92. E. Y. D.

However conceived and brought forth, the book received
both in America as well as England the greatest possible
approbation even on the part of those who could not fully

Altered Plans

Aet. 42

359

subscribe to the author’s therapeutic views. But even they
were for the most part lenient :

. . . Osier is a therapeutic conservative, a therapeutic sceptic,
though by no means a nihilist. ^ Many specifics have been vaunted
in scarlet fever, but they are all useless.’ ^ Pneumonia is a self-
limited disease, and runs its course uninfluenced in any way by
medicine. It can neither be aborted or cut short by any known
means at our command.’ These are hard words for the neophyte
but not for the experienced. Drugs, drugs, is the cry of the average
doctor, and of the average patient too. But drugs aie not all, and
in many cases it is well for us to remember their uselessness as com-
pared with other means. Weir Mitchell, in his little book on Doctor
and Patient, admirably puts the fact that, all along the history of
medicine, the really great physicians were peculiarly free from the
bondage of drugs. . . .

The volume, indeed, was what might be called a practical
pathology in which were given the results of modern
investigation, microscopical, bacteriological, and chemical.
On this foundation was built up the symptomatology and
diagnosis of disease, and where a specific form of treatment
was known to avail it was given its due piominence. Other-
wise there were few recommendations beyond giving a
chance to Nature aided by proper nursing and hygiene.

The birth of a successful text-book, like that of a child,
may hold its authors in unexpected bondage ; and the
corrections which the second printing called for, together
with the promised chapters for Pepper’s projected volumes,
forced him into seclusion for another six weeks. This, or
possibly a better reason, had led him to write to Ogden on
February 29th :

I have been delaying writing to you until the last possible moment,
hoping against hope that I might be able to finish the articles for
Pepper’s new text-book. I simply cannot before March 12th &
shall have to give it up. I have not got more than half through.
Yours of 26th just come — yom friend could take my bunk. I am
very much disappointed as I had set my heart on a 2 mos. trip to
Italy, & it would have been so nice to go with you. You will stop
in here of course on the way.

He managed to wade through this task on time, though
it was a matter necessitating four pages a day ; and much
excellent writing, particularly his chapters on the diseases

360 The Text-book and After Apr.-May 1892

of the blood in the second volume, has come to be entombed
in Pepper’s coversd He had nearly finished by April 1 5th,
when he scribbled to Musser :

Dear old man, Had I not a letter from you about lo days ago ?
It is lost & unanswered. I am finishing my task & reading proofs —
pleasant job. Shall be here for 2 weeks yet. Could you not spend
a night — come by the 3.50 dine here with me & Welch & come out
for a cool eve at St. Johns. Yours W. O.

He had been at home to impart to his family the news
which, apparently as an afterthought he adds as a postscript
to a letter of April 25 th to Lafleur, and of which his mother
a few days later writes to her ‘ dear Chattie saying :

‘ He let Father and me into his secret when he was up, but
we were not at liberty to make known the fact — these
young things always think their love affairs are secrets to
the outside world, whereas lookers-on often see plainly
enough.’ Though the members of his family, Lafleur, and
the Gilmans were let into the secret of these ‘young things’
in their thirties and forties, it remained unannounced
‘ to the outside world ’ until the day of the wedding.
Meanwhile, on May 2nd his presidential address on the
subject of ‘ Specialism ’ was given before the fourth annual
meeting of the Pediatric Society held in Boston. The
diseases of children as a specialty was a new one, and he
referred to the paediatrist as the vestigial remnant of what
was formerly the general practitioner. ‘ That which has been
is that which shall be ’, and he reminded his hearers that
medicine seemingly began with specialization and that
‘ the tail of our emblematic snake has returned into its
mouth, for at no age has specialism been so rife as at present ’.
It was a timely address, on an important topic, and he had
the courage to say that ‘ no more dangerous members of
our profession exist than those born into it, so to speak,
as specialists ’. After an acknowledgement of the un-

^ Though called a text-book, and recommended to students, Pepper’s
two volumes (‘ An American Text-book of the Theory and Practice of
Medicine.’ Phila., 1893), were really an abbreviated form of encyclo-
paedia with many contributors, and, as a text-book, completely eclipsed
by Osier’s.

Aet.42 Specialism and Something Else 361

questioned advantage of the division of labour in the
profession, he went on to sap :

Specialism is not, however, without many advantages. A radical
error at the outset is the failure to recognize that the results of
specialized observation are at best only partial truths, which require
to be correlated with facts obtained by wider study. The various
organs, the diseases of which are subdivided for treatment, are not
isolated, but complex parts of a complex whole, and every day’s
experience brings home the truth of the saying, ‘ when one member
suffers, all the members suffer with it Plato must have discussed
this very question with his bright friends in the profession, — Eryxi-
machus, perhaps, — or he never could have put the following words
in the mouth of Socrates : ‘ I dare say that you may have heard
eminent physicians say to a patient who comes to them with bad
eyes that they cannot cure the eyes by themselves, but that if his
eyes are to be cured, his head must be treated ; and then again they
say that to think of curing the head alone and not the rest of the
body also, is the height of folly. And arguing in this way they
apply their methods to the whole body, and try to treat and heal
the whole and the part together. Did you ever observe that this is
what they say ? ’ A sentence which embodies the law and the gospel
for specialists.^

Three days later, Thursday, May 5th, the Johns Hopkins
Hospital Residents held the second of their annual dinners,
at which Osier responded to one of the toasts. These
gatherings in the early days were apt to be such festive
affairs that it was necessary, lest some of the pranks likely
to be perpetrated suffer interruption, to include the
Superintendent among the guests. Certainly on this
occasion none of the company had any suspicion of what
was uppermost in the mind of the gayest of the party.
The following Saturday morning, which promised a lovely
day in May, Osier took an early train to Philadelphia.
There was nothing unusual in this, nor in the fact that in
the course of the morning he called at 1112 Walnut Street.
Here, ^ unbeknownst ’ even to the faithful coloured servants,
Morris and Margaret, some trunks had been packed and
sent by an express-man to the station at an early hour in
the morning. Shortly before lunch, James Wilson dropped
in, and finding Mrs. Gross and his former colleague sitting

^ Boston Medical and Surgical Journal^ May 12, 1892.

The Text-book and After

362

May 1892

under a tree in the garden, remarked : ‘ Hullo, Osier,
what are you doing over here? Won’t you have lunch
with me ? ’ ‘ No said Osier, ‘ I’ll come in to tea. I’m
lunching here. Why don’t you stay ? ’ This he did ; and
Wilson recalls that ‘ we talked lightly of Grand Manan
which they knew ; of St. Andrews and the salmon rivers,
and moose hunting ; of northern New Brunswick of which
I had knowledge ; and of the charming Canadian doctors.
Osier’s friends, whom we had met ’. This dragged on
between the two men, until presently Mrs. Gross asked to
be excused, with the statement that she was going out
and a hansom was waiting at the door ; whereupon Wilson
made his manners, pleading an appointment, leaving Osier,
who said that Mrs. Gross would give him a lift as she was
going in his direction. It was not until then that the
devoted Margaret was told by her mistress that she was to
be married at 2.30, and, darkey fashion, the faithful girl,
overcome by the informal ways of ‘ white folks ’, exclaimed :
‘ My Gawd, Mam, only a hansom ! Lemme go and fetch
a hack.’ Leaving their bags at the station they drove to
St. James’s Church, where the ceremony was performed, and
having walked back to take their train. Osier sent this
telegram to Wilson : ‘ It was awfully kind of you to come
to the wedding breakfast.’

All this may not be exactly correct, but it is nearly
enough so to show something of Osier’s informality and
imperturbability on even such a momentous occasion as
this. To be sure, they had known each other for a good
many years and both had good reason to feel secure — she
in spite of the fact that some one had warned her, perhaps
Osier himself, that she was going to marry a man who
had books all over the floor. He may have had this in
mind in speaking a few months later to some medical
students on the virtue of method, when he said : ‘ In
one respect, too, the unsystematic physician is absolutely
criminal. By the great law of contraries there is sure to
be assigned to him to wife some gentle creature to whom
order is the supreme law, whose life is rendered miserable
by the vagaries of a man, the dining-room table in
whose house is never “ cleared ”, and who would an he

Aet.42 The Wedding Breakfast 363

could “ breakfast at five-o’clock tea and dine on the
folio-wing da7 ^

|The7 went to New York, and then to Toronto, where on
the 1 6th he was victimized by a public reception given by his
professional friends. They presented him with the bronze
inkstand that in later years always stood on his desk, and
which Osier acknowledged with a few appropriate remarks
to the effect that he owed his success in life largely to James
Bovell of Toronto, who by his kindly interest and advice
had given him the first impetus in his work and had filled
him with ambition to do something in his calling. There
followed a visit to Montreal, where Mrs. Osier had to be
introduced particularly to some Howard children who
thought they were going to be very jealous of any one with
whom they would have to share their beloved ‘ Doccie O’s ’
affection, but they were most agreeably disappointed. Then
a similar visit in Boston to introduce him to her Revere
relatives ; and by the 23rd they were back in Philadelphia,
whence he wrote Thayer to expect him ‘ for bkfast at the
Hospital on Wednesday ’ ; and he telegraphed Hewetson to
bring over some material which he needed in preparing for
a paper to be read the next day in Washington before the
Association of Physicians.^ On the ‘ Wednesday ’, in Balti-
more, he wrote to Lafleur, saying : ‘ I — we — sail on the
Ems on the 28th to Southampton. We shall be in London
until the 1st week of July then go to Cornwall & come
north to Nottingham for the 28 for the B. M. A. meeting.
Let me know your plans — you might get away for a week
or so with us for a little trip at any rate after the meeting.
You will like Mrs Osier very much. She is an old friend
of mine. I feel very safe.’

To W. S. Thayer from W. 0 . Radley’s Hotel, Southampton,

June 6th, 1892.

Dear Thayer, We airived here last evening after a delightful
trip — sunshine all the way & no rough weather until Thursday.

^ ‘ Teacher and Student.’ 1892. Reprinted in ‘ Aequanimitas and other
Addresses

® On ‘ The Cold Water Treatment of Typhoid Fever a topic subse-
quently (Nov. 9th) used for a clinical lecture before the graduate students in
Baltimore {Medical hims, Phila., Dec. 3, 1892, Ixi. 626). In the discussion

364 The Text-book and After Aug. 1892

I escaped all discomfort and ‘ hove ’ but once. We are off to Salisbury
for the day and shall spend tomorrow at Netley Hospital. I hope
you are not being worried too much by the cranks. Tell Hoch
I shall send the introductory note to Hirt next week. I quite forgot
about it. Ask H. to keep up those Typhoid blanks as the cases come
in it would save time. Love to all.

Taking rooms in Clarges Street they quietly enjoyed
London during the first few weeks undiscovered, but soon
found it impossible to escape from being dined and wined
by their many and cordial English friends.

To H, V, Ogden from W, O. Savile Club, 107, Piccadilly, W.,

July 1st [1892].

Dear H. V. O. So glad to have your address this a.m. from
Batchelor. Mrs. O. (! ! !) has often said to me, where is Dr. Ogden,
I should like to meet him to apologize for the theft of his friend.
Our programme is as follows — tomorrow to Exeter and Dartmoor,
Cornwall until the 25th, eve of that date at the George Hotel
Nottingham for the B. M. A. Do come to it if you can, Sunday 31st
at Lincoln — ^why not go with us there ? First week in August London
(Psychological Congress) then to Gowers for a few days by the sea
& sail on N. G. L. from Southampton on the 17th. Let me know
your programme.

So July was passed in Devon and Cornwall, with a visit
to his Aunt Lizzie Osier in Falmouth ; and they subse-
quently posted along the picturesque Cornish coast to
Penzance and Land’s End, where he must have indulged
his antiquarian interests and partaken of the squab pasties
of his ancestors. But even a honeymoon could not beep
him away from medical meetings, and together they
attended the British Medical Association gathering at
Nottingham, an occasion which gave Mrs. Osier such
a distaste for these functions that her advice to wives in
general was to keep away from them lest they pass their
time darning their husband’s socks in an hotel bedroom
while he gallivants with his male companions. One cannot
spend the entire day seeing the Wedgewood in Nottingham
Castle.

There were many old friends at the meeting — Roddick

he mentioned that Nathan Smith had used cold bathing in fevers as early
as 17985 shortly after its introduction hy Currie.

Aet.45 A. Honeymoon in England 365

and Alloway from Montreal, Broadbent, Lauder Brunton,
Jonathan Hutchinson, A. E. Wright, Sandwith from Cairo,
Godlee, D^Arcy Power, and Allbutt, who had just been
appointed Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge. Victor
Horsley was President of the pathological section, and
possibly the most important communication of the meet-
ing was made by him and his pupil Murray on ^ The
Pathology and Treatment of Myxoedema in which an
account was given of the first four cases cured with
the juice of thyroid glands — a direct outcome of their
experimental researches on animals, researches of which
Osier had seen the beginnings in 1885 at the Brown
Institution.

They took advantage of the place of meeting to visit
Chatsworth and Haddon Hall, and the Dukeries of
Sherwood Forest near at hand, and later paid a visit to
Lincoln, which he had not seen before. As he commonly
made reference in his addresses to impressions which were
recent and fresh, so, in the first address delivered soon after
his return, in speaking of the calm life necessary to con-
tinuous work for a high purpose he said :

Sitting in Lincoln Cathedral and gazing at one of the loveliest of
human works, as the Angel Choir has been described, there arose
within me, obliterating for the moment the thousand heraldries and
twilight saints and dim emblazonings, a strong sense of reverence
for the minds which had executed such things of beauty. What
manner of men were they who could, in those (to us) dark days,
build such transcendent monuments ? What was the secret of their
art ? By what spirit were they moved ? Absorbed in thought, I did
not hear the beginning of the music, and then, as a response to my
reverie and arousing me from it, rang out the clear voice of the boy
leading the antiphon, ‘ That thy power, thy glory and mightiness
of thy kingdom might be known unto men.’ Here was the answer.
Moving in a world not realized, these men sought, however feebly,
to express in glorious structures their conception of the beauty of
holiness, and these works, our wonder, are but the outward and
visible signs of the ideals which animated them. Practically to us in
very different days life offers the same problems, but the conditions
have changed, and, as happened before in the world’s history, great
material prosperity has weakened the influence of ideals, and blurred
the eternal difference between means and end. Still, the ideal
State, the ideal Life, the ideal Church — ^what they are and how best

The Text-book and After

366

Aug 1892

to realize them — such dreams continue to haunt the minds of men,
and who can doubt that their contemplation immensely fosters the
upward progress of our race ?

Before their departure for England they had looked in
vain for a suitable residence, and on the return voyage ^
it was learned by mere chance that the Curzon-Hoffmann
house on the corner of Charles and Franklin Streets in
Baltimore was on the market. Consequently, no sooner
had they reached Philadelphia than Osier dashed over to
Baltimore, put his head in the front door of No. i West
Franklin Street, and without further investigation made an
immediate offer, which was accepted. He promptly re-
turned, saying he had bought a house merely because it
reminded him of 1112 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. With
such unhesitating, snap-shot decisions he often transacted
business ; but this choice proved a fortunate one, and during
the succeeding fourteen years No. i West Franklin Street
remained their home, famous for its hospitality.

They had returned in time to join many Johns Hopkins
friends and the large Osier family connexion for the wed-
ding in Toronto, on August 30th, of his niece and former
housekeeper, Georgina Osier, to Dr. A. C. Abbott ; but
apart from this visit they were fully occupied — Mrs. Osier
with the preparations incidental to the transfer of her
household to the new home, and her husband with his
hospital duties — ‘ minding shop while Hurd is away ’, as
he expressed it in a note to Lafleur. As their new house
could not be got ready for occupancy till the middle of
October, they meanwhile took rooms in the old Mount
Vernon Hotel. One would hardly regard these distrac-
tions as favourable for composition, yet he had sufficient
‘ equanimity ’ to write one of his most effective addresses,

^ If they had had any intention of so doing it was not a favourable summer
for a visit to the Continent, for it was the year of another cholera epidemic
Somewhat casual in recalling dates. Osier’s note in the introduction to
Mr. Phipps’s reprint of ‘ The Life of Pasteur ’, in which he says : ‘ Except
at the London Congress [1881] the only occasion on which I saw the great
master [Pasteur] was in 1891 or 1892, when he demonstrated at the Institute
to a group of us the technique of the procedure [inoculation against hydro-
phobia] and then superintended the inoculations of the day ’, refers doubtless
to the visit to Paris in 1890 with Ramsay Wright (see p. 332).

Aet.43 ‘Teacher and Student’ 367

^ Teacher and Student ’d which was delivered October 4th
in Minneapolis on the occasion of the opening of the new
medical buildings of the University of Minnesota.

The occasion offered, as he said at the outset, a chance
^ to still a deep autumnal yearning not unnatural in a man
the best years of whose life have been passed with under-
graduate students, and who has had temporarily to content
himself with the dry husks of graduate teaching \ He spoke
freely of the new ideas in medical education beginning to
supplant an old order which, however admirable in certain
respects, in the absence of the sense of responsibility only
to be preserved when the teachers of a school have univer-
sity opportunities, permitted a criminal laxity in medical
education unknown before in our annals'. And he went
on to emphasize what is so often overlooked, even in these
later days, namely, that —

. • , it is a secondary matter, after all, whether a school is under
State or University control, whether the endowments are great or
small, the equipments palatial or humble ; the fate of an institution
rests not on these ; the inherent, vital element, which transcends all
material interests, which may give to a school glory and renown in
their absence, and lacking which, all the ^ pride, pomp and circum-
stance ’ are vain — this vitalizing element, I say, lies in the men who
work in its halls, and in the ideals which they cherish and teach.

And turning to the Faculty, he ventured to speak in no
uncertain terms of the professor who has outgrown his
usefulness, alone unconscious of the fact ; and in a way
prophetic of his ^ Fixed Period ’ address thirteen years later,
he said :

From one who, like themselves, has passed la crise de quarante ans^
the seniors present will pardon a few plain remarks upon the dis-
advantages to a school of having too many men of mature, not to
say riper, years. Insensibly, in the fifth and sixth decades, there
begins to creep over most of us a change, noted physically among
other ways, in the silvering of the hair and that lessening of elasticity,
which impels a man to open rather than to vault a five-barred gate.
It comes to all sooner or later ; to some only too painfully evident,

^ Reprinted in ' Aequanimitas and other Addresses He appears to have
been reading Newman and also Jowett’s Plato during his honeymoon,
and quotations from ' The Idea of a University ’ and from the ‘ Republic ’
IV are used as texts.

The Text-book and After

368

Oct. 1892

to others unconsciously, with no pace perceived. And with most
of us this physical change has its mental equivalent, not necessarily
accompanied by loss of the powers of application or of judgement ;
on the contrary, often the mind grows clearer and the memory
more retentive, but the change is seen in a weakened receptivity
and in an inability to adapt oneself to an altered intellectual environ-
ment. . . . The only safeguard in the teacher against this lamentable
condition is to live in and with the third decade, in company with
the younger, more receptive and progressive minds.

The following day he addressed the Minnesota Academy
of Medicine, on a topic ^ he had once before used to drive
home certain truths regarding the prevalent laxity in the
matter of registration in the United States — the only
country in the world which commits the mistake of think-
ing that the doctorate should carry with it the licence to
practise He must have spoken extemporaneously, and
held up as a model plan that which had been adopted in
Canada — the election of a medical parliament to control
medical affairs, to hold examinations, and to set medical
standards, rather than to have each individual school
enjoy the privilege not only of conferring its degrees but
of licensing its graduates as well. This he had fought
out in the McGill Faculty, which had, indeed, not been
unanimous in its opinion, for Osier and his friend ^ Dick ’
MacDonnell had heartily disagreed.

There had been many changes on the staff in Baltimore,
and he had planned to see Ogden in Milwaukee to discuss
the possibility of his joining forces with the Hopkins group.
Having failed in this purpose, he wrote shortly after his
return, offering him ^ a berth as Chief of the Medical
Dispensary adding that ^ the town is a God-forsaken
place but full of very nice people

IlO H, A. LajleuT from W, 0 , i West Franklin Street,

Nov. nth, 1892.

Dear Laffie, I was very glad to have your letter to-day. Howard,
MacDonnell & Ross — all gone since I left. Poor Ross ! My thoughts
have been much with him. Had we been in any way settled I should
have gone up this night last week but we are still camping in two

^ ‘ The Licence to Practise.’ Nortkmtem Lancet^ St. Paul, Nov. i, 1892,
xii. 383.

Hard at Work

Aet. 43

369

rooms & I did not care to leave madam (who has hy the way
a young Professor under contract) in all the wrack and ruin of
painters plasterers & paper hangers. Had Ross not had some leaven
of the modern spirit I should not have been appointed in ’74 and
when the ice was once broken between us he was a warm friend
and grew year by year in my affections. ... I am hard at work on
two monographs — tasks for the next six months. Tuberculosis of
the serous membranes & chorea. I often wish you were back
again — the material grows more interesting every year. Hoch goes
about Xmas. Billings & Ramsay are new men — both good fellows.
I hope you will be able to come for a couple of weeks in the spring.
There will be a room here for you 8 c we might go off to Old Point
for a few days or to Phila. Is your friend Martin still in Montreal ?
I want to send him a copy of my Aequanimitas address. You will
have read or skimmed by this time my ^ Teacher & Student ’ plati-
tudes. . . . Yours ever, W. O.^

As is evident from this letter, Osier had already plunged
into work, with two prospective monographs in mind.
But no matter how much occupied, he had thoughts for
other people and ample time to dash oft frivolous notes and
to do kind acts. Thus to one of his small nieces :

Dearest Trixie girl, I was very glad to get your letter this week.
Please dear lamb, do not get icelated yourself, or catch anything
horrid. I have been missing you both to-day & said several times

to Aunt Grace — I mean Mrs. you know ! — I want my little

girls, but you are very far away & only my thoughts can go to 40
Division St. Too sorry about the pussy. I am writing a letter of
condolence to Gwen. Please you black eyed darling measure your-
self from the neck to the hem of your skirt & give me your size for
a nice new very superior John Wanamaker-ish winter dress — ^Hurry
too as I may go to Phila at the end of the week. I have a cold in
my head — but no pain in my pansy. Kiss yourself in the looking-
glass for me and give my love to Auntie & the Jim boy. Ask Mr Jim
what he wants for Xmas You just find out quietly & tell me . . .

^ The Billings he speaks of as a new member of the staff was the son of
John S. Billings ; and Ramsay, a recent Toronto graduate, was subsequently
transferred from medicine to a place on Kelly’s staff. Among Welch’s group,
George H. F. Nuttall had succeeded Abbott in July of the preceding year ;
W. S. Thayer had taken Lafleur’s place as Resident Physician in September ;
John Hewetson, F. R. Smith, and L. F. Barker had been made Assistant
Resident Physicians ; Hunter Robb had been moved to the dispensary ;
J. Whitridge Williams had been appointed an assistant in gynaecology ; and
W. W. Russell, T. S. Cullen, Eugene Van Ness, J. C. Bloodgood and others
had come into the house.

B b

2923 I

The Text-book and After

370

Nov. 1892

On November 28th. he read a paper before the Phila-
delphia Neurological Society on the subject of the heredi-
tary form of chorea (Huntington’s), examples of which he
had observed in two Maryland families. But of greater
present interest than this was an address, seemingly the
outcome of his non-professional summer’s reading, given
two weeks later before the Johns Hopkins Historical Club.
This club, during the session of 1891—2 with H. M. Hurd
presiding, had mapped out for itself a programme which
began with a description by Welch of the ^sculapian
temples and worship ; and there followed a systematic
study of the Hippocratic writings in which many of the
staff participated. It was intended to devote the 1892-3
sessions to Galen, but Galen almost proved the undoing of
the society — he was too colossal — so that after nibbling at
him the club again took refuge in such miscellaneous topics
as the mood of its members suggested. The Greek
Thinkers had long been a source of inspiration to Osier,
who shared Sir Henry Maine’s belief that ‘ nothing moves
in the world that is not Greek in origin ’. When and by
whom he was first introduced to Plato is not clear, unless
by James Bovell, those evenings when he browsed in
Bovell’s library ; but however this may be, he had come
to mention Plato almost as often as Sir Thomas Browne in
his more recent addresses, and had used as a motto for
his Text-book, Plato’s definition of the Art of Medicine.
Accordingly, though Plato only twice directly refers to
Hippocrates, it was natural that he should choose, as
a sequel to the sessions of the club which had been devoted
to Hippocrates, the writings of his great contemporary in
so far as they cast sidelights on the conditions of medicine
in the fourth century b. c. He restricted himself to the
‘ Dialogues ’, the third edition of Jowett’s translation of
which, purchased in London, had in' all probability been
devoured on the steamer.

The paper entitled ‘ Physic and Physicians as Depicted in
Plato ’, read at the meeting of December 14th, consists
largely of quotations from Jowett, and he gives at length
the dialogue between Theaetetus and Socrates, in which
Socrates likens his art to that of a midwife in that he looks

Aet. 43 Physic and Physicians in Plato 371

after the souls of men when they are in labour. There is
in fact less of Osier than Jowett in the essay, perhaps the
most interesting paragraphs from the standpoint of the
former being the introductory one in which he gives reasons
for the selection of his topic. He said :

... in the Golden Age of Greece, medicine had as to-day a triple
relationship, with science, with gymnastics, and with theology.
We can imagine an Athenian father of the early fourth century
worried about the enfeebled health of one of his growing lads, asking
the advice of Hippocrates about a suspicious cough, or sending him
to the palaestra of Taureas for a systematic course in gymnastics ;
or, as Socrates advised, when human skill was exhausted asking
the assistance of the divine Apollo, through his son, the ^ hero-
physician ^sculapius, at his temple in Epidaurus or at Athens
Itself. Could the Greek live over his parental troubles at the end
of the nineteenth century, he would get a more exact diagnosis and
a more rational treatment ; but he might travel far to find so eminent
a ^ professor ’ of gymnastics as Miccus for his boy, and in Christian
Science or faith healing he would find our bastard substitute for the
stately and gracious worship of the .ZEsculapian temple.

From the Hippocratic writings alone we have a very imperfect
knowledge of the state of medicine in the most brilliant period of
Grecian history ; and many details relating to the character and to
the life of physicians are gleaned only from secular authors. So
much of the daily life of a civilized community relates to problems
of health and disease that the great writers of every age of necessity
throw an important sidelight not only on the opinions of the people
on these questions, but often on the condition of special knowledge
in various branches. Thus a considerable literature already illus-
trates the medical knowledge of Shakespeare, from whose doctors,
apothecaries, and mad-folk much may be gathered as to the state
of the profession in the latter part of the sixteenth century. So also
the satire of Moliere, malicious though it be, has preserved for us
phases of medical life in the seventeenth century for which we scan
in vain the strictly medical writings of that period ; and writers of
our times, like George Eliot, have told for future generations in
a character such as Lydgate, the little everyday details of the struggles
and aspirations of the profession of the nineteenth century, of which
we find no account whatever in the files of the Lancet.

But there were other pens busy besides Osier’s, and it must
not be forgotten that his juniors were all successively spurred
to engage in more or less ambitious writings of one sort or
another. Thayer had begun his monograph on malaria,
while F. R. Smith and August Hoch had been translating

B b 2

372 The Text-book and After Dec 1892

Ludwig Hirt’s ‘ Handbuch der Nervenkrankheiten This
appeared early in the next year with the introduction by
Osier referred to in his letter of June 6th — the sort of
introduction he often wrote in later years to boost the sale
of some Tolume in whose authorship he was interested.
The courses for graduates meanwhile were still kept going
with the participation of all the members of the staff,
and, in addition, Billings continued to come over from
Washington to give lectures on the History of Medicine.
But as Osier had confessed in his recent Minnesota address,
the dry husks of graduate teaching were beginning to pall
on the Johns Hopkins group. There was even danger lest
some of them be lured away by calls from other institu-
tions if there was to be much further delay in the opening
of the medical school. Even Welch had been strongly
tempted by a call from Harvard to take the Chair of
Pathology, and it is possible that this may have expedited
Mr. Gilman and the University Trustees in a campaign to
secure funds sufficient for a building in which an under-
graduate school might be started. The name of the uni-
versity still represented an individual to the generation
who had known Johns Hopkins the Quaker merchant, and
many years must needs elapse before an institution would
come first to mind when the name was mentioned. In
spite of this, it was a Baltimore lady who came to the
rescue with a generous sum sufficient to erect the building,
which finally became Mail’s anatomical laboratory, and
to justify the organization of a school — the proper link to
hold together the hospital and university.

Meanwhile, Welch was not the only one of the Chiefs
who was being angled for. The death of George Ross had
left vacant once more the chair Palmer Howard had
occupied before him, and a concerted effort, which appar-
ently had taken its origin among the McGill men in Ottawa,
was being made in Canada to secure Osier for the post at
whatever cost. He must have been strongly urged to
return by friends and relatives alike, and too much may have
been said, for in reply to a letter from his cousin Jennette
he gives this modest opinion of his own attainments :

I do wish you would not build upon me for doing anything beyond

Act, 43 Advances from McGill 373

my fellows ; my abilities are but moderate^ Sc I feel bitterly
sometimes that deficiencies in early education & a lack of thorough-
ness may be with me at every step. In addition to this I have to
earn my bread, so that general medical studies absorb the time that
might be spent in building up a scientific reputation. One thing is
certain : the cultivation of science at the expense of paying work is
an injustice to one’s family.

This call to Montreal, which had been thoroughly venti-
lated in the lay press, apparently culminated on December
13th when the McGill Faculty were permitted to announce
the action of a generous benefactor. This is explained by
the following press item :

Montreal, Dec. 13, 1892. — There is important news this evening
in university circles, and the members of the Medical Faculty are
particularly anxious that the report which has passed from mouth
to mouth to-day shall be abundantly fulfilled. For some months
past, ardent desire has been expressed by those interested in McGill
that every eSort should be made by the university authorities to
induce Dr. Osier, who has become as famous in the United States
since his connection with the Johns Hopkins University as he was in
Toronto and Montreal, to return to Montreal. There was, however,
a serious difficulty in the road, as all felt that the presence at McGill
of a man possessing the abilities of this distinguished medical pro-
fessor would require a heavier drain upon the finances of the institu-
tion than its present position could possibly allow. McGill’s friends,
however, have never deserted her in the past and it seems that once
more a rich and generous benefactor has come forward with an
offer to pay down a lump sum of $1,000,000 and guarantee an addi-
tional $8,000 annually if the famous Canadian doctor, already
mentioned, will once more place his services at the disposition of
McGill and his native land. It can be readily imagined, therefore,
the interest such a matter has created in the city amongst all classes
of our people.

There was certainly need of expedition on the part of
those soliciting subscriptions for the $500,000 fund deemed
necessary to justify opening the school in Baltimore, only
a small portion of which had been raised. On Decem-
ber 22nd Miss Mary E. Garrett addressed a letter ^ to the
university officials offering to make up the remainder of
the sum with these provisoes ; that women be admitted to
the school on the same basis as men ; that the building be

^ Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin^ Dec. 1892, lii. 139.

374 The Text-book and After Dec. 1892

designated the Women’s Memorial Fund Building ; and
that a lay committee of six women be appointed to supervise
the extra-curricular affairs of the women students. On
December 24th the University Trustees met and accepted
the terms of this timely offer; and during the course of
a happy dinner-party of house officers invited to celebrate
the first Christmas in i West Franklin Street a copy of
Miss Garrett’s note and of the action of the Trustees, left
at the door by Mr. Gilman himself, was brought in and read
with jubilation.^

^ Accounts of the early days of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to the time
of the opening of the school have been recorded by many hands : cf. ‘ The
Launching of a University by D. C. Gilman, 1906 ; Fielding H. Garrison’s
account in his ‘ Life of John S. Billings ’ ; Abraham Flexner’s testimony
before the Royal Commission on University Education, London, 1911 ;

‘ Some Memories of the Development of the Medical School and of Osier’s
Advent by H. M. Thomas, Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin^ July 1919.

CHAPTER XV

1893-4

THE OPENING OF THE MEDICAL SCHOOL

The promise of an early realization of starting the medical
school, so long delayed owing to the diminished income of
the university, must have banished any possible thought of
accepting the proposals from McGill. In the following
letter the matter is frankly dismissed :

To H. A. Lajieurfrom W. 0 . i West Franklin Street, Baltimore,

Jan. 12, 1893.

Dear L., — ^Very glad indeed to have your last note, I have, of
course, heard all sorts of rumours about Montreal, but I am too
comfortable here to think of any change, and I hope to fill out my
twenty yeais and then crawl back to Montreal to worry the boys
for a few years. I dare say you would reserve me a chair at your
fireside, and we could have many smokes and chats. We are a good
deal excited of course about the organization of the school. Miss
Garrett has given the $300,000 necessary to complete the half
million endowment. We have the Chairs of Anatomy and Pharmaco-
logy to fill, and shall need someone in physiological chemistry. We
hope to be able to secure Mall in anatomy. The restrictions placed
by Miss Garrett as to the preliminary education necessary will limit
the number of our students very materially. The matriculation
examination of the university is in itself very stiff, and either the
preliminary medical course in Arts, or its equivalent, must be passed
before admission to the medical school. ... I am busy with the
subjects of tuberculosis of the serous membranes ^ and finishing
some work on chorea. ^ The wards are very interesting, the usual
number of cases of arteriosclerosis, a good many interesting cases of
malaria, and an unusual number of typhoids. I am sorry I did not
get reprints of my lecture on the bath treatment. I dare say you
saw it in the Medical News. Our results for the first century of cases
were really very good. You must arrange in the spring to pay us
a long visit. Let me know, too, when you think I should write to
the members of the Victoria Hospital Board. You should certainly

^ ‘ Tuberculous Pericarditis ’ Amencan Journal of the Medical Sciences^
Jan. 1893. Cf. also Shattuck Lecture on ‘Tuberculous Pleurisy ^ (See
below, p. 384).

^ ‘ Remarks on the Varieties of Chionic Choiea, See.’ Journal of Nervous
and Mental Diseases^ N. Y., Feb 1893.

37^ Opening of the Medical School Spring 1S93

make a strong push to go in there on the staff. Councilman was
here for two weeks and Ghriskey for a week, so that the boys are
rather demoralized. I enclose a little slip which you will please
hand to one of the House Surgeons at the M. G. H. I want very
much to find the address of the Farr family of progressive muscular
atrophy, which I reported many years ago. . . .

PS. Do you think Shepherd would come here in anatomy?
There would of course be no hospital appointment. He combines
surgical and scientific anatomy as well. Mall has a comfortable
berth in Chicago and I doubt if he can come.

Evidently his work as usual was in full swing, and recourse
must be had to his mother’s letters to learn that anything
out of the ordinary was on his mind. On January 24th she
wrote to Mrs. Gwyn : ^ I had a scrap from Willie this
morning — no wonder he has been laid up with a cold, such
a freezing time for one who loves warmth as he does ; he
puts on a good show of spirits but in his heart of hearts
I know he must have an anxious time as to the coming
event.’ And on February 17th : ^ You will have written

to Baltimore I know and will have shared with us all in
the first glow of gladness and then in the deep wave of
sorrow.’

To H, A, Lajleurfrom W, 0 . Feb. 18, 1893.

Thanks for Peter Ibbetson, which I shall ceitainly read on your
recommendation. I had intended to write to you last evening,
to tell you about my domestic troubles . . . the small boy died at the
end of a week, very much to our sorrow. Everything goes very
smoothly at the hospital. We hope to open our medical school in
October. There has been a slight hitch about the terms of admission
but they have all been settled. We shall go to Toronto at Easter,
and very probably go round to Boston by way of Montreal. Please
do not forget that you have promised to spend a week here some
time in the spring. Your room will be ready at any time.

They paid a visit later on to their friends the Conynghams
in Wilkesbarre, and one morning his wife found on her
dressing-table a letter the tenderness and humour of which
must have provoked that mixture of tears and laughter
which is best for bereaved people. It was postmarked
^ Heaven ’ and was written by Paul Revere Osier to his
Dear Mother :

... If we are good & get on nicely with our singing & if our
earthly parents continue to show an interest in us by remembering

Act. 43 Tears and Laughter 377

US in their prayers, we are allowed to write every three or four
tatmas (i.e. month). I got here safely with very little inconvenience.
I scarcely knew anything until I awoke in a lovely green spot, with
fountains 8c trees Sc soft couches 8c such nice young girls to tend
us. You would have been amused to see the hundreds which came
the same day. But I must tell you first how we are all arranged ;
it took me several days to find out about it. Heaven is the exact
counterpart of earth so far as its dwellers are concerned, thus all
from the U. S. go to one place — all from Maryland to one district
Sc even all from the cities Sc townships get corresponding places.
This enables the guardian angels to keep the lists more carefully
Sc it facilitates communication between relatives. They are most
particular in this respect Sc have a beautifully simple arrangement
by which the new arrivals can find out at once whether they have
connections in Heaven. I never was more surprised in my time —
we say that here, not life Sc not eternity for that has not started
for us — when the day after my arrival Althea brought me two quill
feathers on one of which was written Julius Caesar Sc the other
Emma Osier. I knew at once about the former . . . but the latter
I did not know at all, but she said she had been father’s little sister
Sc she had been sent to make me feel happy Sc comfortable. . . .

Unlike the real angels we have no fore-knowledge Sc cannot tell
what is to happen to our dear ones on earth. Next to the great
feast days, when we sing choruses by divisions in the upper heavens,
oui chief delight is in watching the soul bodies as they arrive in our
divisions Sc in helping the angels to get them in order and properly
trained. In the children’s divisions not a friad (i. e. about an hour
of earthly time) passes without the excitement of a father or mothei,
a brother or a sister united to one of us. We know about looo of
each other so that it is great fun to see our comrades Sc friends
making their relatives feel at home. . . .

Osier’s deep interest in the welfare of all his associates
and assistants, past and present, is an outstanding feature
of his brief letters. There were literally hundreds of them
which have been preserved by his pupils first and last —
short notes, which show his concern for their work and
prospects, after they had gone out from under his wing.
Thus from Baltimore on April 19th he sent one of his
frequent missives to Lafleur :

It might not do any harm to write to Donald Smith and to
Davidson (both of whom I know well) and urge your claims. It
would really be most satisfactory for you to get the position. Do
come down if you can, even for a few days. It will be delightful to
have you. You must of course come and stay with us. I was over-

378 opening of the Medical School Spring 1893

joyed to hear o£ the extra hundred thousand doUais. It puts the
old school in a splendid position. By the time my twenty years
here are up I shall enjoy very much going over all the fine depart-
ments which McGni will then have. . . .

He began at this time to plan for a comprehensive review
of the hospital’s experience with typhoid fever, and the
series of eight papers, which form the first fasciculus of
the 1895 volume of the Hospital Reports, were projected.
These studies were based on the 229 cases of typhoid which
had been treated in the medical wards in the four years
since the opening of the hospital, that is, to May 15, 1893.
Two of the eight papers were by Thayer and Hewetson,
the other six being written by Osier. Typhoid has become
such a rare disease through the improved sanitation of
cities that it no longer occupies the important position in
medicine it held thirty years ago when the disease was so
prevalent that Osier had led off with it in his Text-book,
on the ground that it was the most important point of
departure for students.

Then regarded with civic indifference, the disease to-day
is looked upon as a disgrace in any community, and in
bringing about this' altered attitude Osier played a part
far more important than any contribution he may have
made to the knowledge of the disease in the way of diagnosis
or treatment, or of pointing out some obscure complication
like ‘ typhoid spine ’. One reservation to this statement
may possibly be made in view of his constant reiteration
that the diagnosis, so commonly made in the South, of
‘ typho-malarial fever ’ — as though this were a special
disease — was unjustified by any known facts and merely
served as a cloak in civic health reports to conceal actual
typhoid. Largely through the influence of his writings,
this hybrid disease disappeared. Ample opportunity had
been given at the Hopkins to determine the point, for in
contrast to the 229 cases of typhoid there had been 500 of
malaria in the wards, all proven beyond doubt by the
demonstration of the plasmodium in the blood. There
had been only one patient in the four years in whom
a definite typhoid was implanted on a co-existing malarial
infection.

Aet. 43 The Gospel of Preventive Medicine 379

But, leaving this aside, his main contribution to the
subject related to public sanitation, for until the Baltimore
authorities began to wake up, and a skilled bacteriologist
was added to the Health Board, he never ceased publicly to
reiterate statements such as he gives in the opening para-
graph of the last of these papers : ^

Among the cities which still pay an unnecessary Delian tribute of
young lives to the Minotaur of infectious diseases, Baltimore holds
a high rank. The pity of it is, too, that this annual sacrifice of
thousands of lives (2,281 for 1892, not including consumption),
is not due to ignorance. For more than fifty years this gospel of
preventive medicine has been preached — ^whether they would hear
or whether they would forbear — ^in the ears of councils and cor-
porations ; that three measures^ efficiently designed and efficiently
carried out^ reduce to a rtiimmum the incidence of infectious diseases :

pure water ^ good drainage, and a proper isolation of the sick*
Of sanitary essentials in a modern town, Baltimore has a well-
arranged water supply ; still, however, with unprotected sources and
constant liability to contamination. It has nothing else — no sewage
system, no system of isolation of the sick, no hospital for infectious
diseases, no compulsory notification of such a disease as typhoid
fever, no disinfecting station, no system of street-watering, no
inspection of dairies, no inspection of meat. The streets are cleaned,
but so carelessly that for a large part of the year the citizens breathe
a mixture of horse-dung and filth of all sorts. Perhaps the best
gauge of the sanitary conditions of a city is to be found in the mor-
tality returns from typhoid fever.

Pneumonia, Typhoid, and Tuberculosis — these were the
three scourges at which he aimed his shafts — the three
diseases an intimate knowledge of which he hammered
incessantly into his students. He lived to see one of them,
typhoid, nearly abolished, tuberculosis got under control, —
and pneumonia was to be his own undoing.^

^ Johns Hopkins Hospital Reports, VIII, ‘ Typhoid Fever in Baltimore.’

1894-S, iy. 159 .

^ The influence which, fiist and last, Osier exercised as a national and civic
sanitary propagandist has been too little emphasized. To-day in our com-
parative security against serious epidemics it is difficult to realize the annual
death-roll of the ’90’s from diseases now under control. In this summer of
1893 the International Medical Congress which was to have been held in
Rome, despite the prevalence of malaria there, was postponed because of
a widespread cholera epidemic which had already taken a toll of 10,000 lives
in Mecca, whence it had reached Rome, even Paris ; and New York was in

380 Opening of the Medical School May 1893

Baltimore in the early ’90’s probably differed little in its
external aspects from the post-bellum Baltimore of the late
’6o’s. Environed north and west by the beautiful rolling
countryside of Maryland, to whose wooded hillsides the well-
to-do moved for the sweltering months of summer, and in
whose fertile valleys they rode to hounds, the city itself,
sharply demarcated from all of this, was a homely place of
architecturally unpretentious block houses on parallel streets
— north and south, east and west. The hospital was planted
on a hill on the outskirts of the city to the east, and from the
upper windows of the administration building the dwellers,
back in their rooms at the end of the day’s work, looked across
a flat sea of roofs to two other low hills in the residential
centre of the town. On one of them, silhouetted against
the western sky, stood a tall column — the Washington
monument ; on the other, near by, the low dome of the
Catholic cathedral — in Mr. Gilman’s happy phrase, the
three hills of Charity, Hope, and Faith.

Near the cathedral was No. 1 West Franklin Street, and
the palace, so-called, of his Eminence James Cardinal
Gibbons, good neighbour and fine citizen that he was,
stood just back of the Osiers’, a narrow, rat-infested Balti-
more alley lying between. A good two miles separated the
hospital from this part of the town, and at peculiar and
somewhat uncertain hours a ‘ bobtailed horse-car ’ made its
tortuous way through untidy, cobbled streets, and after
crossing an odoriferous stream called Jones’s Falls, con-
venient for the refuse of the decrepit factories, tanneries,
and the like which lined its banks, the car would toil slowly
up the hill, east or west, with an extra horse attached. In
Baltimore of that day, one’s bath flowed shamelessly and
soapily into the gutters of the cobbled streets over which
were stepping-stones such as are preserved to be wondered
at in Pompeii. But there was one sanitary rite religiously
observed on bended knee — the scrubbing of the front steps
of each of the houses by a genus of polite but easy-going
coloured gentlemen known as ‘ waiter-men ’ — a matutinal

quarantine. Nevertheless, typhus was raging even in New York, small-pox
prevailed widely in England and America, and yellow fever continued its
devastations — a third year of successive outbreaks.

Aet. 43 Baltimore Then and Now 381

rite of suds and marble, yet with an abundant opportunity
for salutation and gossip. Meanwhile, the mistresses of the
several households likewise passed the time of day, pro-
vendering in the old-fashioned, buzzing, open markets,
which groaned with the produce of the Chesapeake Bay and
the farms of its fertile Eastern Shore. Untidy, lethargic,
hospitable, well-fed, contented, happy Baltimore. But this
Baltimore, alas, for it was picturesque and beloved, is gone.
A beautiful suburban Baltimore has arisen, the city’s streets
have been paved, the newest of sewer systems installed with
the vanishing of Jones’s Falls into a conduit ; and in all
this transformation, the influence of the Hopkins is strongly
apparent, and Osier himself had no small part in it.

Faithful as he was at attending meetings, there had to
be a limit ; and so early in May he writes Ogden to explain
why he must forgo the A.M.A. meeting to be held in
Milwaukee, saying : ‘ I have the Pediatric Society at
West Point on the 23rd, 24th and 25th, the Association of
American Physicians at the end of the month in Washington,
and the Massachusetts Medical Society at which I have
the Shattuck Lecture on the 13th of June.’ He was much
beset. On May 17th he sends the following to Lafleur, in
distress that he had failed to get the appointment at the
Royal Victoria :

Dear L., Yesterday was a dies irae. Everything went wrong,
so when your letter came I would not read it & said to Mrs. Osier
‘I just know Lafleur has not got the R V.’ The devil take those
feUows ! It is too bad & I am sorely disappointed. Why not throw
up the whole thing & come down here as Associate in Medicine?
We could give you from the school $500 , 1 would supplement it for
three years with $500, and you could control the dispensary & do
some outside practice. I want Thayer to go abroad for Oct. Nov.
& Dec. during which mos. you could live in the Hospital & take
his duties. The dispensary work, pathological studies &c would
keep you busy & your literary ventures would bring you in time
a good berth. It was a mistake to have left without a definite call.
Do come to the Pediatric Soc. I shall be there Wednesday eve.
Leave with me Friday p m & come straight thro, to i West Franklin
& we can discuss the situation. ... PS. Aequanimitas is out of print —
not a copy left. I send the other.

The meeting of the Pediatric Society to which he

382 Opening of the Medical School May 189^

refers was held at West Point under the presidency of his
old dinner-club friend of Montreal days, A.^ D. Blackader,
The group of children’s specialists was growing and at this
time the society had 45 members, most of them, to be sure,
men of broad training in general medicine. Osier, one ojf
the appointed participants in a discussion of whooping-
cough, was on the programme for two other papers as well.
One of them, an important study of a rare disease, acute
diffuse scleroderma, though largely written by Osier was
presented in the name of one of the assistant residents —
Lewellys F. Barker,^ and it was characteristic that he
should have presented this paper in full, whereas that under
his own name was read by title only, to appear subsequently
in the Society’s published Transactions.^ A few days later
the Association of Physicians, coming to be a group of
closely knit friends, met as usual in Washington for its
annual gathering, at which the chief topic assigned for
discussion had been myxoedema.^ Francis P. Kinnicutt
of New York was the referee and gave an historical account

^ The patient had been under the care of Dr. Ellis of Elkton, Maryland,
and Osier had taken Barker, who had recently joined the house staff, down
with him to help perform the autopsy. Barker was the first of a succession
of Canadians, Toronto graduates, the picked men of their time, who after
finishing a service at the Toronto General Hospital gravitated to Baltimore
on the recommendation of Osier’s friend, Jas. E. Graham, the Professor of
Medicine in Toronto. Succeeding Barker during the ’90’s were Cullen,
Parsons, Futcher, and the McCrae brothers Their first summer before
going into the Hopkins was usually spent at the Garrett Hospital for
Children at Mt. Airy, Frederick County, Maryland.

^ This was entitled ‘ Notes on Tuberculosis in Children ’ {Archives of
Pediatrics, N Y., Dec., 1893, x. 979) and was a side-issue in the preparation
of the article on tuberculosis for Starr’s ‘ Handbook of Children’s Diseases

® Unquestionably, however, the most notable communication was that
made by Theobald Smith on ‘ Texas Cattle Fever ’ in its relation to protozoon
diseases. Though his results had previously been published by the Govern-
ment Bureau of Animal Industry, this was the first time his epochal discovery
— a pathogenic micro-organism which could be transmitted only through the
agency of an intermediary host (in this case the cattle tick) — ^was brought
before the profession. The paper was briefly discussed by Welch alone, and
one wonders whether the great significance of the discovery, which was to be
followed by a succession of others — the mosquito in malaria and in yellow
fever, the tsetse fly in sleeping-sickness, the flea in plague, the louse in
typhus — could then have been fully taken in by the majority of Theobald
Smith’s auditors.

of the advance in knowledge of the disease and its treatment
since i88i, when Ord first gave it its name and showed the
convincing group of cases at the International Congress
which met that year in London. Subsequent to the report
by Horsley and Murray of the summer before, it had been
found by Hector MacKenzie that extracts of the gland
taken by mouth were as effective as when its juices were
injected, and Kinnicutt was able to report a case of his
own thus treated with benefit. James J. Putnam followed
with a paper on the treatment by sheep’s thyroids, but
there was still so great confusion between myxoedema,
exophthalmic goitre, and acromegaly that in reviewing the
situation to-day it hardly seems possible that the snarl of
the thyroid diseases could ever have become so far untangled
as it has been. Osier followed in turn with a paper on
‘ Sporadic Cretinism in America ’, and there are certain
noteworthy things about his article. ' In the first place,
when compared with the papers of his colleagues it indicates
an extraordinarily clear grasp of the subject, historical as
well as clinical, and he strips his facts of all confusing
details. In the second place it shows the immense amount
of labour which he put into the preparation of his papers,
for in this instance he had not only made an exhaustive
search for cases in the literature but had sent letters of
inquiry broadcast to the superintendents of all the asylums
for the insane, and institutions for feeble-minded children,
both in the United States and in Canada, as well as to
numberless physicians practising in localities where goitre
was supposed to prevail. His picture of that ‘ pariah of
Nature ’, the adult cretin, remains a classic.^

As he had written Lafleur early in the year, he was at
work on tuberculosis of the serous membranes, for the
tendency to regard many of the inflammations of these
surfaces as tuberculous was beginning to prevail. Having
already dealt with the pericardial infections, he devoted
his Shattuck Lecture before the Massachusetts Medical

^ At this same meeting he gave a report published in the Canadian
PracUUoner upon five cases of subphrenic abscess ; and during the year a
number of other papers appeared, the titles of which are to be found in his
bibliography.

384 Opening of the Medical School June 1893

Society, in Boston on June I3t}i, to ^ Tuberculous Pleurisy
This lectureship had been established through a bequest
made by George Cheyne Shattuck, who had died only three
months before in his eightieth year. This Shattuck was
one of the group of Louis’s later American pupils including
Henry 1. Bowditch, Stille, Metcalfe, and Gerhard, who
were students in Paris in the early part of the century,
when French medicine was at its apogee — a group of men
whose names were often on Osier’s lips. He was the son
of another Dr. George Cheyne Shattuck, and he of a Dr.
Benjamin Shattuck, near contemporary and admirer of
George Cheyne, the famous old London and Bath physician.
During this Boston visit Osier stayed with his friend of
Vienna days, Dr. F. C. Shattuck, the son of the founder
of the lectureship, who himself had a son George Cheever
about to enter medicine, and Osier never ceased to harp
on the fact that neither of these two had borne the full
name of George Cheyne. So in this bread-and-butter note :

To F, C, Shattuck from W, 0 . i West Franklin Street,

Thuisday.

Dear Mr. Prof. Dr. F. C. S — Such a shame you or G should not
have been G. C, but I suppose it is now too late. Look up for me
in a spare moment your father’s paper on Typhoid read before the
Paris Med. Obser. Soc. It may be among his old papers. Stille
has his in MS. Gerhard & Pennock’s is in print. It would be nice
to get the Coll of Phy to issue them together. I will talk to S W M
[Mitchell] about it. Thanks for a very pleasant visit.

^ His monograph on the subject, first published in the Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal^ contains an analysis of the seventeen cases which had been
observed since the opening of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The paper well
illustrates his invariable custom of mentioning the names of all of those who
in any way came in contact with the patients whose histories were included ;
and scattered through the report one finds the names of Flexner, Councilman,
Finney, Halsted, Barker, F. R Smith, Hewetson, Thayer, Rupert Norton,
Welch, and other members of the staff, as well as those of the physicians who
had referred the patients to the hospital. His feeling in this matter is well
expressed in a note scribbled to one of the junior members of the staff who
had submitted a paper to him for criticism. It reads as follows : ‘ A. A i.
report ! I have added a brief note about the diagnosis. I would mention
in the medical report the name of the House Physician in Ward E & the
din. clerk, & under the surgical report the name of the House Surgeon who
had charge. We are not nearly particular enough in this respect 8 c should
follow the good old Scotch custom. Yrs W. 0 .’

Aet. 43

Welch’s Laboratory 385

In this dry recital of the occurrences incidental to these
many meetings, the activities at the hospital with which
Osier’s brief letters are chiefly concerned must not be
forgotten, i West Franklin Street meanwhile saw a succes-
sion of visitors, whose bare enumeration would read like
an hotel register. But while he dispensed hospitality it
was to the work of his colleagues that the attention of his
guests was chiefly drawn, and to the pathological depart-
ment first of all. Welch’s laboratory, indeed, for a decade
had been in active operation and had proved a nursery
for many who subsequently made names for themselves.
Among the early group of graduate students who had
worked there was George M. Sternberg while stationed in
Baltimore as examiner of recruits in the late ’8o’s ; and at
about this time he had been succeeded by Walter Reed,
who likewise was given permission by the Washington
authorities to take some courses in the Hopkins clinic and
laboratories, where were laid the foundations of the training
in bacteriology which first set him to work on yellow fever.
All of this led, ten years later in Cuba, in connexion with
John Guiteras, Carroll, and Lazear, to Reed’s epochal
discovery of the part played by the mosquito in this once
dreaded disease.^

To G, M, Sternberg from W, O. June 29, 1893.

Dear Dr. Sternberg, Though late, let me offer you my sincere
congratulations on your promotion to the Surgeon-Generalship.
I had hoped before this to be able to call and offer them in person.
I see by this morning’s paper that you have organized your Army
Medical School, and I am delighted to see that you have appointed
Dr. Reed to one of the Chairs.

Reed had a winning personality which made him so great
a favourite with the early group at the Hopkins that any
success he might attain in life would be the source of the

^ It was not until twenty years after Reed’s demonstration of the mode of
transmission of yellow fever and when the disease had largely come under
control through sanitary measures alone, that Noguchi of the Rockefeller
Institute discovered the bacterial agent, an organism beyond the power of
vision with the methods at their command in the days when Sanarelli,
Sternberg, Reed, and others spent much time in a search for the organism.

2923.1

cc

386 Opening of the Medical School Aug. 1893

greatest gratification to them/ and this appointment as
Director of the Pathological Laboratory of the new Army
Medical School was but the forerunner of many others
subsequently bestowed upon men who got their training in
Welch’s laboratory.

The following note to Ogden, written towards the end
of August, tells of his summer movements. It was the year
of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which they had
evidently been urged to attend.

‘ Nobska,’ Woods Hole [undated]

Dear H. V. O. Yours of July 12th has been in my handbag too
long unanswered. I was very sorry that we could not go to Chicago,
particularly as our friends with whom we were to go were very
charming Sc had a delightful home. I will let you know, should
we decide Sc we would, of course, see you. We left Balt on the
14th of July, went to Toronto stayed 10 days & then I was called
away to Wilkesbarre Mountains — case of typhoid in a family very
near Sc dear to Mrs Osier. After 10 days there we returned to
Toronto, spent a week & then on to Montreal. I took Gwen Sc Bea
for a little trip and last Friday we came on here to the Fays’, cousins
of Mrs O. We then go to Mrs Chapin’s at Falmouth (a sister in
law) Sc I shall return about Sept 3rd. I cannot make up my mind
about the Pan-American [Congress] — but I do not like to desert
my friends who are in it. You have not been away for six months.
Do come & spend a week or ten days in the autumn. There are
three spare rooms in the house & I should like you so much to see
Sc know Mrs Osier.

The Pan-American Medical Congress, held in Washington
early in September on the invitation of the Government,
was elaborately organized under twenty-two sections, and
Osier as usual did not ^ desert his friends for William
Pepper, it may be added, was President. The Transactions
of this congress were subsequently issued by the Govern-
ment Printing Office in two fat volumes, within whose
covers much excellent work has doubtless been entombed.
What is of interest, however, is that Section XXI was
given over to a discussion of Medical Pedagogics — a novel
topic for such a gathering. The question of proper standards
of medical education and the essential preparation therefor

^ Cf. H. A. Kelly’s ‘ Walter Reed and Yellow Fever ’. N.Y,, McClure,
Phillips & Co., 1906.

Aet. 44 Medical Pedagogics 387

was, at the time, on every one’s tongue, and much of the
discussion revolved around the heretofore unheard-of
requirements for admission announced by the Johns
Hopkins School, to go into effect with their incoming first
group of undergraduate students. Unquestionably the
medical schools in the United States had been hampered
by their low admission requirements, by the absence of
close union with the branches of learning comprising the
other faculties of a university, by the scant stress laid on
the pre-medical sciences, and by the absence of endowment
which made the remuneration of the teachers depend
wholly on the fees of the students. Even William Pepper
had become converted, for in his inaugural address to the
students the following month at the University of Pennsyl-
vania, where an obligatory four-year course had just been
adopted, he actually referred to the enormity of teaching
by lectures, and stated that ^ the broad basis of modern
medical education is the careful training of the individual
student at the bedside and in the laboratory Thus
Osier’s five years in Philadelphia were evidently not in vain.
Meanwhile the group of Hopkins people, who by their
action had precipitated much of this, were not themselves
entirely at ease — particularly in regard to the question of
co-education :

Gilman, Osier and I [writes Dr. Welch] were not enthusiastic
about the conditions imposed by Miss Garrett and Miss Thomas
in the gift of the ‘ Women’s Memorial Fund ’ which met the an-
nounced condition of the Trustees for opening the Medical School.
My impression is that neither Osier nor I signed the petition to the
Trustees for accepting these conditions, and we sympathized with
the fruitless efforts of Mr. Gilman to induce Miss Garrett to make
certain comparatively slight, verbal alterations in the terms of the
gift, the main change which we desired being the substitution of
‘ equal ’ or ‘ equivalent ’ for ^ same ’ in specif7ing the terms for
admission and training of women and men students, but she would
not budge. Still, we were so eager to start the school that we were
glad that the Trustees accepted the gift. As it turned out, the
embarrassments and difficulties which we feared in the novel venture
of co-education in medicine never materialized. The terms for
admission to the medical school were not the invention of Miss
Garrett or Miss Thomas, but years before I had set them down in
a document which Mr. Gilman and the Trustees asked me to prepare

CC2

388 Opening of the Medical School Sept. 1893

soon after I came to Baltimore. Miss Garrett got this document
through her lawyer, Mr. Gwyn, who was an influential Trustee of
the university. She naturally supposed that this was exactly what
we wanted. It is one thing to build an educational castle in the air
at your library table, and another to face its actual appearance
under the existing circumstance. We were alarmed, and wondered
if any students would come or could meet the conditions, for we
knew that we could not. As Osier said : ‘ Welch, it is lucky that we
get in as professors ; we never could enter as students.’

Fortunately there were strong men with strong con-
victions at the helm of the newly launched school, and
probably Welch, Osier, and Billings had most to do with the
programme which at this time extended little beyond the
mere statement of entrance requirements. For, without
any definitely prearranged curriculum, the school in a
seemingly haphazard and rather Southern fashion was
allowed to grow and develop from year to year. The
requirements for admission comprised, in addition to
a degree of bachelor of arts or of science, a two years’ pre-
medical training in biology, chemistry, and physics, with
a reading knowledge of French and German — requirements
which few collegiate institutions other than the Hopkins
itself were prepared to meet ; and when it became known
that the entering class consisted of only eighteen students,
whereas the teachers distributed through the hospital and
laboratories considerably outnumbered them, there was
doubtless much lifting of eyebrows in medical circles
elsewhere. But much water had run over the dam since
the exercises attending Mr. Gilman’s inauguration in 1876,
when Huxley had stressed the importance to a medical
course of preliminary biological and chemical studies, and
the public was becoming adjusted to these ideas and to the
necessity, at whatever sacrifice, of a union in spirit as
well as in name between medical schools and universities.
Welch had emphatically emphasized this in an address
given at Yale ^ the year of Osier’s appointment. And now
John S. Billings, in an article® which had just appeared
in print, admitted that this higher medical education

^ ‘ Some Advantages of the Union of Medical School and University.’
Journal of the American Medical Association, Mar. 30, 1889.

® ‘ Medicine as a Career.’ Forum, N.Y., 1893, xiv. 725.

Aet. 44 The First Eighteen 389

necessitated a long and expensive preparation. In presenting
a hypothetical example, he said :

My young friend whose attention I wish to direct to medicine as
a career will have spent five years at a good intermediate school as
a preliminary to entering the university, which he does when he is
about seventeen years old. He spends three or four years at the
university, four years at the medical school, one and one-half years
in the hospital, and two years in travel and special studies. When,
therefore, he is ready to begin work he will be about twenty- eight
years old, and his education, living, books etc., will have cost about
eight thousand dollars from the time he entered the university.
It can be done for less, but this is a fair average estimate.

To these beginnings may be traced our present educa-
tional quandaries, for this programme has widely come into
effect, the only difference being that Billings placed the age
of entering college lower than the average, so that his
hypothetical young friend would be at least thirty when
ready to begin the practice of an arduous profession, the
first years of which are apt to be years of patient drudgery.
Billings and his colleagues, however, had something else
in mind than the average medical aspirant, namely, the
training of selected men as teachers and investigators.
And though they did not come under Osier’s immediate
influence until two years later, probably no group of medical
students ever began their education with more brilliant
prospects or had more devoted attention paid to them than
the small coterie who entered the Hopkins school in this
autumn of 1893. They started in very simply, these first
eighteen, three of whom were women ; and were it not
too great a digression it would be interesting to learn
whence they had come and what happened to them, one
and all, during as well as after their four years’ course, for
several made notable contributions to medicine even
before graduation ; and their subsequent careers show
what may be done with a small group of students under
such favourable circumstances. The unpretentious, factory-
like building where their studies began under Mall
the anatomist and Abel the pharmacologist,^ must in

^ Physiology was then taught in the university laboratory ‘ across town ’
by W. H. Howell, one of Newell Martin’s pupils, who had been recalled

390 Opening of the Medical School Autumn 1893

itself have been a surprise, though a greater shock came
later when they found they were no longer to be simply
fed with knowledge previously accumulated but, given the
opportunity, must do most of the acquiring for themselves.
This, however, is a side issue from Osier.

Until it was time for these students to finish their course,
the house positions were filled by a picked group of young
men, graduates of other schools. It was a happy and
intimate family, and by the students the three heads of
departments — Welch, Osier, and Halsted — were soon nick-
named ‘ Popsey ’, ‘The Chief’, and ‘The Professor’.
Outsiders came to complain that the Hopkins group was
a ‘ Society for Mutual Admiration ’, and if this may be
taken to mean that good feeling, friendliness, charitableness,
and helpfulness prevailed — enviable qualities enough in
schools where they were less in evidence — the epithet was
not misplaced. Nor could other than happiness and good
feeling have prevailed in a group of which ‘ The Chief ’
made one. There is no gainsaying that the university and
hospital bearing the name of its none too greatly beloved
founder, was looked upon somewhat askance during these
early years by the more clannish Baltimoreans who naturally
clung to their local medical worthies. The medical pro-
fession, perhaps more than others, guards its local preroga-
tives with jealousy. There were already five medical
schools in the city, resulting, as has been said somewhat
cynically, ‘ in the division of the profession into as many
hostile camps, all the members of which extended any
remaining hostility to the Hopkins institutions ’. But
largely through Osier’s personal charm and likeableness
this feeling was entirely overcome, factions were brought
together, hostility vanished, all sharing alike in the reputa-
tion being built up for Baltimore as a great medical centre ;
and there is little wonder that his departure twelve years
later was looked upon as a civic calamity which roused
a wail of lamentation.

Though W. S. Thayer’s absence abroad, for a period of
study, added to Osier’s responsibilities at this time, and though

from Harvard. Poor Martin’s scientific career, so full of brilliant promise,
ended about tliis time.

Aet. 44 Osier’s Relations to Surgery 391

at work on the chapters promised for the second volume of
Pepper’s Text-book, he nevertheless found time to write
for a meeting of the Historical Club a charming appreciation
of Charcot, whose sudden death on August i6th had been
so universally deplored.’- Some of the things he said of
Charcot were prophetic of the position Osier himself was
rapidly coming to hold, for he too ‘ escaping the thralls of
nationalism ’ was making an enduring impression as a cosmo-
politan teacher and leader. During this school session also
his six carefully prepared lectures on ‘ The Diagnosis of
Abdominal Tumours subsequently collected and pub-
lished (1895) in book form,^ were delivered before the
post-graduate students. For their benefit it was e-vidently
his intent to compare, so far as possible, the provisional
clinical diagnoses of the cases -with the subsequent findings
either at autopsy or at operation ; and although the
lectures seem admirably composed, and were doubtless
delivered with abundant clinical illustrations in Osier’s
inspiring manner, they are now out of date and of interest
chiefly from an historical standpoint. Though many of
the conditions with which he dealt had not as yet begun
to be turned over to the surgeon, in concluding the
last lecture of the series, given in December, he says :

‘ You will have noticed in how many cases the surgeon
made it [the nature of the tumour] a certainty, not, un-
happily, in diagnosis only, but also in prognosis. But
desperate cases require desperate remedies, and in no single
instance were the chances of a patient damaged by the
exploratory incision.’ One may read between the lines of
this quotation something of his relation to surgeons and
surgery. At this time appendicitis was still largely regarded
as a medical disorder ; the surgery of the gall-bladder had
scarcely begun ; whereas the stomach and the duodenum
lay in surgical fields practically unexplored. The paragraphs
of his Text-book which deal with therapeutics, critics had
regarded as the weakest feature of the volume, and his
courageously expressed views upon the futility of many of
the drugs in common usage had been termed nihilistic.

^ ‘ Jean-Martin Charcot.’ J. H. H. Bulletin, Sept. 1893, iv. 87-8.

* Published also in the New York Medical Journal, 1894.

29 ^ Opening of the Medical School jan.-Feb. 1894

Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of his unusual
powers of visualizing disease gained in the post-mortem
room, he was far more tolerant than most of his contem-
poraries with the so-called surgical invasion of the tradi-
tional province of internal medicine which took place during
the next twenty years. He knew surgeons well, and their
particular point of view ; and it has been said of him that
few physicians have ever shown better surgical judgement
or had a more instinctive and certain knowledge of the
proper moment for surgical intervention.

1894 ^

There are scraps of letters which permit one to follow
his literary and professional activities during this year :

ToH.V. Ogden from W, 0 , i West Franklin Street,

Jan. 23, 1894.

Dear Ogden, — I am due in Chicago on Wednesday, February 7th,
to attend a committee about the Association of American Medical
Colleges. If I gave you Thursday evening in Milwaukee I could
get back, I suppose, in time on Friday to take the Limited, as I must
be here on Saturday. I should be very glad to meet some of the
boys at a quiet little dinner — not too many of them of course ;
just some of your special friends. When will you have your paper
on alkaptonuria ready? Davis I know will be delighted to have it,
and carefully studied cases are so rare that it would make a very
satisfactory communication. . . .

A constant worker and writer himself, he rarely failed to
spur on his friends and pupils into productivity ; and he
dogged Ogden about this subject of alkaptonuria in letter
after letter until it was written up and published. As
already stated, however delighted his pupils might be to
get a postcard from ^ The Chief’, it was not an unalloyed
pleasure, for the card usually contained a memorandum
likely to keep the recipient busy for some time. His own
pen, however, set an example, and his juniors needed little
prodding to get out their reports.

To H, A, Lajieuf from W. O. Feb. 10, 1894.

Dear Lafleur, — The highly-scented second volume of the American
Textbook of Medicine ^ is here, and I will take the first opportunity

^ The articles in this, Pepper’s second volume, on which Osier had
been working the year before, represented 64 very carefully worked-over

Aet. 44 Postcards from ‘The Chief’ 393

of sending it. You might let me know if you hear of a chance.
Things go on much the same here. In a few days you will have
our Typhoid Fever Report, in which you will recognize a number
of old friends. He wet son and Thayer are working hard at the
malaria material. I send you three tuberculosis pamphlets.^ In that
toxaemia case there was a serious error of omission, as there was no
tuberculosis of the cerebrospinal system. Yours &c.

That Osier was coming to be much called upon, not only
for his head and heart, but for his willing pen, doubtless
explains the character of his correspondence, for, abundant
though it was in amount, it grew to be more and more
laconic. Thus, a note of February 25th to William Pepper,
whose resignation as Provost had been made public the day
before in a remarkable letter to the Trustees of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, merely says : ^ Glad & sorry that you
have resigned, but you have done your share. A thousand
congratulations on the splendid work you have accomplished.
Yours ever.’ Another example of his brevity is given in the
appendix of an address delivered by Weir Mitchell in this
same year.^ Dr. Mitchell had sent out a questionnaire to
a number of physicians for an expression of opinion on the
existing conditions in the asylums for the insane in America
— their present faults, and changes to be recommended.
Most of the replies covered one or two printed pages,. Osier
wrote as follows, probably on a postcard, giving in a nutshell
all that the others had said at length :

The needs are : (i) Emancipation from politics. (2) Separation
of executive and professional functions. (3) A staff of assistants trained
in modern psychological and pathological methods. Yours, W. O.

He, however, could get a great deal more than this on
a postcard — as could also E. Y. Davis — a favourite, ready-

printed pages. The first section, * On Diseases of the Suprarenal Capsules
and Ductless Glands compared to its present-day extent represented
a very small subject, including only the thymus, thyroid, and adrenals. The
second and larger section, on ^ Diseases of the Blood ’, was a subject then
being intensively studied, and one which Osier’s experience made him
particularly fitted to generalize upon.

^ The ‘ Typhoid Fever Report ’ consisted of a collection of eight papers,
four of them his own — a matter of ninety printed pages. In the most
interesting of the ‘ three tuberculosis pamphlets ’ he made a strong plea for
the notification of pulmonary tuberculosis.

^ Cf Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, July 1894, xxi. 413.

394 Opening of the Medical School Feb. 1894

at-hand medium of correspondence for both of them, as
has been pointed out. The following, bearing the stamp
of March 27th, was scribbled to H. P. Bowditch, doubtless
when E. Y. D. had arisen from breakfast, which he was
accustomed to share with a book at 7.30 a.m. Though
Osier himself was almost a teetotaler, E. Y. D. perhaps
held different views :

Dear Bowditch That Committee of, & on, drink & drinks &
particularly that section of it with which you are concerned, viz. on
the deaths from much drink, would do well to investigate the effects
immediate and remote of the Berlin Congress spree. I am reminded
of it this a m at breakfast (Ham & eggs again !) by my friend
Mr. Plutarch who in his life of Alexander gives an account of a rattling
old drunk in which ‘ Promachus drunk four measures of wine &
carried off the crown but survived it only 3 days.’ Forty three of
the guests died ! Love to the family all Yours ever

Egerton Y. Davis.

This postcard alludes to the Committee of Fifty which had
been organized the year before for the purpose of accumu-
lating some dependable facts, divorced from opinions,
regarding the liquor problem. Four sub-committees had
been appointed to consider : (i) the physiological ; (2) the
legislative ; (3) the economic ; and (4) the ethical side of
the question. Of the first of these sub-committees John S.
Billings was chairman and H. P. Bowditch one of the
members, while Osier, among many others who were not
themselves actually members of the original committee,
had been called upon frequently for their advice regarding
the researches in progress. Osier knew well enough that
it was a serious investigation : it was his ‘ M’Connachie ’
that made him appear trivial. What he really felt about
the use and abuse of alcohol, which as a physician he almost
never prescribed, is shown in a note to a friend in the South
acknowledging a reprint of a paper which he had received
dealing with the evil effects of drink. He wrote on his
usual medium : ‘ That was a good address but you are a
little hard on Bacchus who after all is a pretty good fellow —
when sober. W. O.’

As stated, he was beginning to suffer the penalty of his
position, his popularity, and literary ability, by being called

Aet. 44 ‘The Army Surgeon’ 395

upon for frequent pubKc addresses, which in the midst of
his more serious professional work he somehow found time
to prepare. Though he at times fretted under these tasks,
he found it hard to refuse an appeal. There were four of
these addresses during the following twelve months — the
first, at the request of Sternberg the Surgeon-General,
being given on February 24th before the students of the
Army Medical School, in whose laboratories, as has been
told, Walter Reed was at work. This may have influenced
him, though he was always ready to lend himself when his
spoken word was likely to be of help ; and the Medical
Corps of the army, then as now, needed the moral support
of the profession at large. He chose as his title, ‘ The Army
Surgeon and spoke of the meaning and methods of work —
‘ the value of experience is not in seeing much but in seeing
wisely ’ — and he pointed out wherein existed the oppor-
tunities of research for members of the medical corps even
though stationed in remote army posts, provided one
followed the maxim of the Sage of Chelsea. He pointed
out, also, that ‘ permanence of residence, good undoubtedly
for the pocket, is not always best for wide mental vision in
the physician ’, and quoted Sir Thomas Browne’s words
regarding the nimble and conceited heads that never look
beyond their nests, and plume themselves on light
attainments :

Fortunate it is for you [he said] that the service in one place is
never long enough to let the roots strike so deeply as to make the
process of transplantation too painful. Myself a peripatetic, I know
what it is to bear the scars of parting from comrades and friends,
scars which sometimes ache as the memories recur of the days which
have flown and of the old familiar faces which have gone.

And after much good and stimulating advice he closed with
the story of Beaumont so often told to his students — the
story of ‘ a man who amid circumstances the most unfavour-
able saw his opportunity and was quick to grasp the skirts
of happy chance ’. In all this he had in mind the army
surgeon in times of peace, unconscious that the young men
before him were destined twenty years later to be divisional
surgeons serving in France, and he himself an honorary

^ Reprinted as No. VI in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses

39^ Opening of the Medical School May 1894

Colonel and Consultant in a war undreamed of, in which
bullets were to be more numerous than bacilli.

Early in the spring in a letter to Ogden, which mentions
their summer plans of a trip abroad, he says : ‘ I have
already made a number of corrections for a new edition of
my text-book as my contract calls for a triennial revision.
I shall be very glad indeed to have your list of corrections.
When is that paper of yours to come out ? ’ But his own
work was in arrears, as he indicates in the following of
May 17th to Lafleur :

We have postponed our sailing to July 12th, on the Furst Bismarck.
We had taken passage for next week, but I have three or four things
unfinished that would have spoiled my holiday, so that I decided
it would be better to postpone it, and then stay a little later in the
autumn. With the exception of a week in June, which I shall spend
in Boston, I shall be at home now until we sail, and I wish you
would come down and spend a week here. You could run over to
Washington every day. Why shouldn’t you come to the meeting
of the Congress. You will see a number of old friends, and it will
be very pleasant.

Among the things unfinished was possibly the address
entitled ‘ The Leaven of Science ’, delivered four days later,
on May 21st, at the opening of the Wistar Institute of
Anatomy, in Philadelphia.^ This institution, since so well
known, was founded by General Isaac J. Wistar, a member
of the Biological Club, in memory of his grand-uncle Caspar
Wistar, one of the most notable of the famous succession
of anatomists at the University of Pennsylvania school —
Phpick, Shippen, Wistar, Dorsey, Horner, Gibson, and
Leidy. After a proper eulogium of these men, Osier went
on to a discussion of anatomy and its place in medical science,
weaving his account around a story ascribed to Barclay the
English anatomist, of the reapers, the gleaners, and finally of
the geese who still continue to pick up a few scattered grains
among the stubble. Then turning to Pepper, who was to
lay down his duties a month later after having done so much
for the material prosperity of the university, he continued :

Here at last, and largely owing to your indomitable energy, Mr.
Provost, are gathered all the externals which make up a Schola major

Reprinted as No. V in his collected addresses, ‘ Aequanimitas [&c.] ’.

Aet. 44 ‘The Leaven of Science^ 397

worthy of this great Commonwealth, What, after all, is education
but a subtle, slowly-efiected change, due to the action upon us of
the Externals ; of the written record of the great minds of all ages,
of the beautiful and harmonious surroundings of nature and of art,
and of the lives, good or ill, of our fellows — these alone educate us,
these alone mould the developing minds. Within the bounds of
this campus these influences will lead successive generations of youth
from matriculation in the college to graduation in the special school,
the complex varied influences of Art, of Science, and of Charity ;
of Art, the highest development of which can only come with that
sustaining love for ideals which ‘ burn bright or dim as each are
mirrors of the fire for which all thirst ’ ; of Science, the cold logic
of which keeps the mind independent and free from the toils of
self-deception and half-knowledge ; of Charity, in which we of the
medical profession, to walk worthily, must live and move and have
our being.

The triennial Congress of American Physicians and
Surgeons, to which he referred in the last letter to Lafleur,
met in Washington a few days later — May 29th to June ist.
It was not unlike other gatherings of the sort, with addresses
and papers before the various special societies, with dinners
and receptions, one of them at the White House — it was
during Grover Cleveland’s term. Washington, like other
places, indeed, is at its very best the last week in May, and
so it was this spring of 1894, even though its legislative halls
were wrangling over the ^ trusts ’ and Coxey’s army was
threatening to descend upon them. Moreover, there was
a doctor in the Senate — at least he had had a course in
a homoeopathic medical school — ^who was on the eve of
making trouble for the profession by the introduction of
a succession of anti vivisection bills. Alfred L. Loomis of
New York, who was President of the Congress, made ^ animal
experimentation ’ the subject of his presidential address,^
and a resolution was introduced before the Congress by
William H. Welch protesting against any legislation tending
to interfere with the advancement of medicine by means of
experimentation conducted by properly qualified persons.
Welch, indeed, introduced resolutions of this kind before
a great number of medical and scientific societies, and when
the most serious test came four years later, he bore, as will

^ ‘ The Influence of Animal Experimentation on Medical Science.'

398 Opening of the Medical School June 1894

be told, the chief burden of so organizing public opinion
that Senator Gallinger’s bill was defeated. _ There was one
striking argument in favour of animal experimentation that
could not be advanced at this time, for it was a year
too early for returns. Nevertheless, Behring’s successful
elaboration of antitoxins against diphtheria and tetanus had
been announced and received with great enthusiasm, for
diphtheria was prevalent and hopes were raised that a
boundless field for serum therapy was about to be opened
up. It was recognized as only the beginning of a new era
in the treatment of infectious diseases and in the checking
of epidemics, one of which, bubonic plague, was raging at
this time in Southern China. ^

This June saw the close of the first year of the Hopkins
Medical School, and though another twelve months elapsed
before the students came directly under Osier’s tutelage,
he was prevailed upon by his friend Chadwick of Boston to
attend a meeting of the Harvard Medical Alumni Associa-
tion held towards the end of the month, shortly before his
sailing, and to say something regarding their Baltimore
programme. His informal remarks, which were taken down
and appeared unedited in print, ^ indicate that he made
some apologies for the length of course demanded by their
entrance requirements. After suggesting that an arrange-
ment might be made similar to that in existence in
Cambridge, England, whereby the pre-clinical studies
would be regarded as proper subj'ects counting for an
academic degree, he continued in lighter vein to consider
another way in which the Johns Hopkins school differed
from others. This, his second point, was,

. , , aa extremely delicate one, namely co-education. It has
wrung your withers here to some slight extent. When I parted
from my preceptor, he gave me a copy of the Apocrypha, on the
title-page of which he wrote : ‘ When a woman woos, what woman’s
son will sourly leave her till she hath prevailed? ’ Now, while on
principle I am opposed to co-education, guided as I have always

^ It was in connexion with this epidemic, to investigate which Kitasato
had been sent by the Japanese Government, that the discovery was made of
the specific organism of plague.

® Bulletin of the Harvard Medical Ahmm Association, 1894, No. 7, 39-43.

Aet. 44 'The Elder Aphrodite 399

been by the Apocrypha and my preceptor, I was warmly in favour
of it particularly when the ladies came forward with half a million
dollars. You know, of course, that this was offered to Harvard
Medical School, and that President Eliot and the late Dean struggled
over the offer a good deal. We had but one serious opponent in
Johns Hopkins, ^ — Dr. Councilman, who, brought up in theological
schools, and with a strong theological bias [!], was opposed most
thoroughly to co-education, and would have nothing to do with it.
Accordingly, we made a bargain with President Eliot and Dr.
Bowditch. We took the money, and you took the man. We have
co-education without Councilman, and you get Councilman without
co-education. All our plans succeeded, and everything went
smoothly and nicely and quietly. The Board of Lady Supervisors
arranged with President Gilman and Dr. Welch, the Dean, that
Minerva Medica should not be the presiding goddess — she was not
good enough — but that the elder Aphrodite, the motherless
daughter of Uranus, should be installed as the presiding genius of
the school. Under her there would be loyal devotion to truth, to
science, and to work. The younger Aphrodite, the daughter of
Dione and Jupiter, was banished, and ordered not to be seen within
the walls. When you go against nature, you fail utterly. I come
here to-day with sorrow at my heart to tell you that co-education
has proved an absolute failure, from the elder Aphrodite’s standpoint.
When I tell you that 33-J- % of the lady students admitted to the
first year of the Medical Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University
are, at the end of one short session, to be married, then you will
understand why I say that co-education is a failure. If we lose
33 i % at the end of the first session where will the class of lady
students be at the end of the fourth? In all other respects co-
education is a great success.^

They sailed for England on July 12th ; and from London,
where rooms were taken at 40 Clarges Street, he wrote to
his assistant, Thayer :

24th [July]

I see the Sydenham Soc. has issued the monographs of Marchiafava
& Bignami & Mannaberg, with the plates. I will ask about the
cost of reproduction. We are comfortably settled & are enjoying
London immensely. After all it is the world. We had a delightful
voyage, not a moment’s uneasiness. The Robin Robbs dined with
us on Sunday. They have been honeymooning at Cliveden forsooth !
with the Astors. Robin now takes a 7.75 Lincoln 8 c Bennett, has
double soles on his shoes Sc wears an eye glass. They left on Monday

^ Later, to his great chagrin, one of the survivors — another 33 J per
cent. (!) — turned Christian Scientist

400 Opening of the Medical School Aug. 1894

for Paris. [Weir] Mitchell is here, & a great success. In the pro-
fession I have only seen a few of my friends as we do not wish to
begin a round of dinners. I hope you are not burdened with work.
Love to all the boys. Tell Billings I have not yet seen the Ords.

I shall go there tomorrow. Send me word now Sc again how every-
thing is progressing. Mrs Osier sends love to all. . . .

And a few days later to the same :

Yours & the book came this a m. Thanks, I will ask for estimates
on the plates. We have been enjoying London so much — theatres
dinners &c. I have not seen many Drs. except at the Comitia of
the R C P and at the dinner in the eve. They put me next to the
president who pumped me dry about our work. Dear old Wilks
too has a great idea of the future of the Hopkins. I have been at
Gowers’ for several evenings. He is much better tho still a little
excitable. I went with Horsley to a private operation on Friday.
He took out a dural sarcoma about the size of his fist which had
been growing for 15 years & had caused fits supposed by a long
series of neurologists to be truly Epileptic. ... I am going tomorrow
with Blackader, Roddick, Stewart & de Schweinitz to the B. M. A.
at Bristol & then on to Falmouth. We go on the 8th to Oxford
Sc after that to the sea for a fortnight. Then to Paris for a week
Sc back here again. Let me know if I can get you anything. . , .

The British Medical Association met in Bristol the first
week in August and there Osier with Hale-White and others
participated in a symposium on the general subject of
pyrexia and its treatment.^ This meeting was immedi-
ately followed by the gathering in Oxford of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science. It was a
memorable occasion, chiefly because Huxley, who only the
year before had given his Romanes Lecture On Evolution
and Ethics was again in the Sheldonian Theatre ; but the
circumstances were very different from those when in i860,
at the last meeting in Oxford of the same Association, he had
rebuked Wilberforce. The Marquis of Salisbury, Chancellor
of the University, presided, and in his opening address dwelt
somewhat sarcastically on the revolt against Aristotle by the
growing sciences of observation, and in regard to evolution
stated that ^ the laity may be excused for returning a verdict
of not proven ’’ upon the wider issues the Darwinian School

^ Unpublisked. It probably formed tbe basis of his paper, ‘ Hyperpyrexia
in Typhoid Fever before the Johns Hopkins Medical Society a year later.

Aet.4S Salisbury and Huxley 401

has raised Huxley, who had been engaged to second the
customary vote of thanks for the address, sat through it,
it is said, tapping his foot, but, as he subsequently wrote,
resisted temptation and ‘ conveyed criticism in the form
of thanks As interested spectators, the Osiers sat in
a little pulpit-like place in the Sheldonian and listened to
these exchanges, little dreaming how familiar the scene was
to become some day when instead of being guests in rooms
at the Clarendon Hotel they were to become most abundant
hosts on similar occasions to many wayfarers, in what came
to be known as ‘ The Open Arms Nor could anything
have been further from Osier’s prognostications than his
address, twenty-five years later, here in this home of the
classics and as President of the Classical Association, on
‘ The Old Humanities and the New Science

The usual scientific sessions followed, sessions interspersed
by the gastronomic festivities customary to such gatherings
— a formal public dinner of course, at which Burdon
Sanderson appeared, to the amusement of his pupils of former
University College days, unconscious that he wore no tie.
More informally they lunched with Sir Henry Acland, who
owing to the infirmities of age was soon to resign the Regius
Professorship. On first entering Acland’s library. Osier
exclaimed with delight at the panel of three portraits —
Linacre, Harvey, and Sydenham — which stood over the
mantel. He made such an ado about it that Mrs. Osier
subsequently asked Sir Henry if they might not be copied
for him as a birthday present. This was done, and in turn
the triumvirate came to adorn the mantel of his own library
and office at l West Franklin Street, a familiar sight to
countless students, friends, and patients. This same panel,
moreover, was to dominate Osier’s library in Oxford, for
though his teacher Burdon Sanderson came between, it
would almost seem as though Acland had knowingly handed
on an emblem of the Regius Professorship to the man
destined, in the whirligig of time and place, to become his
successor.

On the last day of the meeting, a bust of Thomas Syden-
ham was unveiled by Salisbury in the Oxford Museum —
a science hall which Acland and Ruskin had succeeded in

D d

402 Opening of the Medical School Aug. 1894

erecting in the very centre of classical Oxford. The address
on Sydenham given by Acland on this occasion, is mentioned
in the next letter, written from Swansea to W. S. Thayer :

The Langland Bay Hotel, Langland,
Sunday 19th.

We have been here, in a sort of Welsh paradise, since Tuesday.
Delightful Hotel — managed in a way that would warm Mr Emery’s
heart — and as you see a fine beach. But the thermometer has not
gone above 65 since Aug 1st so that for my cold marrow bathing is
impossible. The walks are good & we spend the mornings on the
rocks. Swansea is only six miles away & my niece May Francis,
Mrs. Chas Bath, lives just outside the town, & my Father has a whole
tribe of cousins here many of whom I have never seen. You would
have been astonished to see me at cricket yesterday. I am stiff
to-day from the exercise. The Oxford meeting was a great success —
socially at any rate & we enjoyed it very much. I dare say Barker
showed you the letter I wrote him while there. We go on to St Davids
on Tuesday & Tenby & shall return to London about Sept ist . . . Send
your Typhoid paper to Professor Sherrington, Brown Institution
Wandsworth Rd. London S. E, We saw so much of Hans Virchow,
who is wildly enthusiastic about America, Hale-White, Pye-Smith,
Broadbent & others were at the meeting. I have received some
interesting photos from Sir Henry Acland, whose address on Syden-
ham I have sent to the Nezvs, Poor Gould has been laid up — was
ill in London — also at Bristol, where I had to take his place at the
dinner. Fortunately Dawson Williams edited my remarks about
Hart Sc his missionary work, which was evidently taken au seneux^
judging from the report in the journal. I am reading proofs of my
little monograph on chorea ^ — How is the Malaria ? I suppose you
are melted & worked to death. Thank Smith for his letter. I am
sure the locum tenens is a great success. Miss H. returns Sept ist
and will be at your disposal. I want her tho. to go over all the old
cases & add the anatom. Diagnoses. I will send you a memo of
what I want her to do so that you may know how much there is.
Love to all the boys — Billings, Norton, Oppenheim, Carter, Barker,
Flexner & others — not forgetting Mr Emery & Miss Bonner.
Yours ever W. O.

Monmouth, 24th [August]

Dear Thayer, I was very glad to have your nice long letter which
reached me at Tenby. We were nearly frozen in South Wales — so
cold & damp & we came on here yesterday for the Wye valley which
is divine. To-day we were rowed 12 miles down to Tintern Abbey.

^ The English edition was dedicated to Gowers and the American one to
Weir Mitchell.

Aet. 45

Play and Proof Reading 403

We go up the river to Hereford 8c then to London. I am delighted
to hear good accounts of the malaria. I am sure it will be a telling
piece of work. Did you do anything about the subcut. fibroid case ?
Dictate a lecture to Miss H. on it. I am sorry to say we shall not be
back until Oct ist and as I must see you for a couple of days you
might postpone the sailing until the 5th. You need not hurry
back you will have earned a good six weeks. We shall go directly
from N. Y. to Toronto. I have not had very good accounts of my
father — the heat has tried him very much. Set Miss H. at the
Histories filling in the no. of the autopsy & the anatom, diagnosis
in all the fatal cases. She has also the lectures on abd. Tumours to
send off, but there is no hurry as I have told her to be primarily at
your disposal. . . . Love to all the boys.

On his return to Baltimore for the opening of the school
session, he evidently found awaiting him an invitation from
R. H. Ruttan, the Professor of Chemistry and University
Registrar at McGill, asking him to participate in the
ceremonies planned for the dedication of the new medical
building whose erection had been warranted by a bequest
left by J. H. R. Molson.

7o F.J, Shepherd from W, 0 . Wednesday

Dear Shepherd, Ruttan’s note was sent from England and
I found it here on Sunday. I sent word at once, that as the time
was so short it was quite out of the question. I thought of course
the opening was for Oct. 1st. Your letter this am made me refer
again to his & I find it is for Nov. i. I really could not prepare
another lecture this year & in so short a time. I have, as you know,
written two within the last six months (the Army Surgeon, & the
Leaven of Science) and I do not feel that I could face a third with
the amount of necessary work I have on hand. I am very sorry
indeed as it would have been a great pleasure to be with you all
again. I heard of you from the [Stephen] Mackenzies. You won
the hearts of the children. I had a lettei from Cunningham this
week in which he says they enjoyed your visit very much. We were
kept pretty busy in England. I was preparing a little monograph
on chorea & doing some reading about Sydenham in the British
Museum. I hope we shall see you here before long.

Within the space of twelve months Medicine lost at this
time three great figures — distinguished in very different
fields — Helmholtz, Holmes, and Huxley. Oliver Wendell
Holmes died on October 7th, and at the next meeting (on
October 15th) of the hospital medical society, Osier read

D d z

Aet.45 The ‘ Latch-keyers ’ 405

Franklin Street, who were known as the latch-key ers
inasmuch as each was given a key and had free access to the
house at any time — an evidence of the readiness with which
Osier, no matter how busy, brooked interruptions by his
friends. It was another custom of the household to give
a plain gold ring to each of these ^ latch-keyers ’ to wear
as a form of protection against any designing and matri-
monially minded Gretel they might encounter while
sojourning on the Continent ; and it may be presumed that
Thayer and Hewetson were so protected on this their first
trip of observation abroad.

The projected Montreal ceremonies must have been
postponed for his sake, and somewhat to his despair, until
the first of the year ; and on November 24th, shortly
after returning from the autumn meeting of the Mary-
land ^Faculty’ held in Cumberland, he wrote to Lafleur,
saying :

We shall be delighted to see you here after Xmas. We shall
probably be in Phila. for the 25th & 26th but I will let you know
accurately so that you can arrange when to leave. Miss Humpton
(who is still with me) has mailed a copy of the Abd. Tumour Lectures
to Dr. Campbell. We have our Malaria fasciculus nearly ready.
Thayer & Hewetson have an elaborate paper. I am busy with
STUFF for Wilson & Dercum — infernal hack work. I hate it.
Remember to take back your Vol ii of Peppers Text-book — I send
this eve a copy of my remarks on O W Holmes. What the deuce
am I to talk about in January at the opening? I am rather exsiccated
at present. Remind me also to give you some duplicate works of
Charcot. I treated myself to a complete set lately.

^ Exsiccated ’ though he might have thought himself, and
busy with the effort to clear his desk of the ^ hack work ’ he
had been beguiled into doing for others, he evidently
without effective protest had taken on something more
of the same kind. He wrote to Ogden on November 29th :

Dear O. Very glad of your letter this morning. You really must
come on in the spring. Why not to the Am. Med. Ass ? or better
to the Ass. of Am. Phy. towards the end of May. Mrs. O says that
my friends do not like her — they never come now to stay with me —
so mend your ways soon. I shall get Fitzgerald’s letters — I peeped
into them at the Athenaeum Club this summer. I am very busy
on some of the confounded composite text-books & systems. J, C.

4o6 Opening of the Medical School Nov.-Dee. 1894

Wilson’s Handbook of Treatment. Dercum’s Nervous Diseases.
Clifford Allbutt’s New S7stem & Loomis’ New System — Deuce take
them all.i I shall look out for your artpcle]. Where ?

For reasons which affected injuriously the finances of the
university, Baltimore at this time possessed one modernized
but little-used railway station. The chief portal of entry,
however, from north and south lay through sulphurous
tunnels into a rickety station which belied the prosperity
of this the rival railway, which indeed, according to rumour,
entertained serious thoughts of side-tracking Baltimore in
order to shorten the transit from Washington to Phila-
delphia. Such Baltimoreans as travelled beyond the
suburbs were mostly known by name to cordial and well-
mannered cabbies and station porters ; but there had come
to be an increasing influx of strange faces, so many of whom
asked to be taken to a certain residence that the following
phrase came to be a by-word among them — ‘ Fur caps and
square hats to Dr. Osier’s ’. Accordingly, any one wearing
the peculiar flat-crowned derby of a Bostonian of the day,
or the cap suited to a Montreal winter, was promptly and
cordially greeted by a smiling darkey with : ‘ A’ll take yo’
right to I Wes’ Franklin Street, sah.’ ‘ March, April, May,
June or any month will be convenient for us to put you up,
and I hope you will be able to pay a nice long visit — you can
potter around and be just as independent as you please ’, is
a familiar paragraph in Osier’s letters, and his brief notes
always contain in a postscript or elsewhere something to the

^ The ‘ confounded text-books and systems ’ of this particular time, with
the number of pages he contributed to each of them, are as follows : In
J. C. Wilson’s ‘ American Text-book of Applied Therapeutics ’ (Phila., 1896,
pp. 902-7) he discussed the diseases of the blood, and ductless glands.

For F. X. Dercum’s ‘ Text-book on Nervous Diseases, by American
Authors ’ (Phila., 1895, pp. 203-26), he wrote the chapter on infectious
diseases.

For vol. i. of ‘ A System of Practical Medicine ’, by A. L. Loomis and
W. A. Thompson (Phila., 1897, pp. 731-848), he wrote a concise but masterly
presentation on the general subject of Tuberculosis.

For the great English ‘ System of Medicine ’, edited by T. Clifford Allbutt
(vol. lii, 1897, pp. 721-42), he wrote the chapter on malarial fever ; stating
that ‘ the introduction of cinchona into Europe two hundred and fifty years
ago ranks not only as one of the greatest events in the history of medicine but
as one of the great factors in the civilization of the world ’.

Aet. 45 ‘ Good and Fyne Fare ’ 407

effect that ‘ the kettle boils daily at 4*50 or ‘ there ’s

always an extra place at the table at seven

Though being drawn away from the laboratory into
wider fields, he was still a member of the Physiological
Society, then, as now, a small and select body of pure
scientists who met somewhere each year for the last few
days of the Christmas recess. On this occasion Osier played
the r 61 e of host rather than participant in the sessions, and
he fully enjoyed his houseful of guests. A memorable dinner
was held at the Maryland Club, famous for its table — oysters,
terrapin, duck, and madeira to make the mouth water —
and the menu graced by quotations concocted by Osier and
ascribed to imaginary writings of a number of the Society’s
members was introduced by the following (‘ the Yle
Utopia Revisited ’) jibe at Weir Mitchell :

In that land the wise men, known as Siphograuntes, meet in
‘ sweet societies and earnestly bestowe their vacuante and spare
hours in seeking a knowledg of the perfect liffe, the which they say
is to be atchieved in these gatherings, and more hyghelye in certain
evening conclaves known as smokers and dynners. For thoughe in
these festivities no man be prohibited to dyne at home yet no man
doth it willingly, because it is counted a point of smal honestie to be
absent. It were a follye, say they, to take the payne to dresse a badde
dynner at home when they may be welcome to good and fyne fare
so nighe hand at the club. For herein they suppose the felicitie of
liffe to consiste.

Occasions of this sort in which Osier participated were
invariably enlivened in some such fashion ; evidently he
had been reading Sir Thomas More and in a subsequent
address at Albany in 1900 he gave the long quotation from
‘ The New Yle Utopia ’ in which More describes the care
of the sick in the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER XVI

1895-6

TEACHING, OBSERVING, AND RECORDING

The dedication of the new buildings in Montreal took
place early in January and Osier’s presence served to awaken
the periodic rumour that he would be recalled to McGill.
Somehow during the past month he had managed to prepare
an address, suited for the ears of a lay audience, entitled
‘ Teaching and Thinking — the Two Functions of a Medical
School In this, with his usual optimism, he answers the
‘ bitter cry of Isaiah, that with the multiplication of the
nations their joys had not been increased ’, and tells his
audience that they ‘ may now pray the prayer of Hezekiah
with a reasonable prospect of its fulfilment

’Tis no idle challenge which we physicians throw out to the world
when we claim that our mission is of the highest and of the noblest
kind, not alone in curing disease but in educating the people in the
laws of health, and in preventing the spread of plagues and pesti-
lences ; nor can it be gainsaid that of late years our record as a body
has been more encouraging in its practical results than those of the
other learned professions. Not that we all live up to the highest
ideals, far from it — we are only men. But we have ideals, which
means much, and they are realizable, which means more. Of course
there are Gehazis among us who serve for shekels, whose ears hear
only the lowing of the oxen and the jingling of the guineas, but these
are exceptions ; the rank and file labour earnestly for your good, and
self-sacrificing devotion to your interests animates our best work.

However, he does not spare the physician ‘ who without
physiology and chemistry flounders along in an aimless
fashion, never able to gain any accurate conception of
disease, practising a sort of pop-gun pharmacy, hitting now
the malady and again the patient, he himself not knowing
which ’ — a contrast to the studious and hard-working men
who live in hospitals and dispensaries endeavouring to
obtain a wide and philosophical conception of disease and
its processes — men ‘ who form the bulwarks of our ranks and
outweigh scores of the voluble Cassios who talk themselves
into, and often out of practice ’. Nor do the clergy
escape, for with the Bible in hand he raps them ‘ as notorious

Jan. i89S Not made for a College President 409

supporters of all the nostrums and humbuggery with which
the daily and religious papers abound and finds that ‘ the
further away they have wandered from the decrees of the
Council of Trent the more apt are they to be steeped in
thaumaturgic and Galenical superstition As an indication
of the direction of his reading he is found quoting from
Keats and from Thomas Dover ; and he makes an appeal
that McGill reach out widely for the best wherever found,
else ‘ an institution which wraps itself in Strabo’s cloak
and does not look beyond the college gates in selecting
professors may get good teachers but rarely good thinkers
With McGill already liberally endowed, ‘ there remains now
to foster that undefinable something which, for want of
a better term, we call the university spirit, a something
which a rich institution may not have, and with which a
poor one may be saturated, a something which is associated
with men and not with money, which cannot be purchased
in the market or grown to order, but which comes insensibly
with loyal devotion to duty and to high ideals, and without
which Nehushtan is written on its portals ’ — all of which
has a sound of John Henry Newman.

It would appear that Principal Dawson was about to
resign, and in casting about for his successor Osier must
have been the first and single choice of the university
authorities. That he would accept must have been taken
for granted, and an announcement that he would do so went
broadcast through the press on January loth. This met
his eye while en route for Baltimore from Boston, where he
had gone to meet Mrs. Osier, who had been visiting her
mother ; and on reaching home they found the servants,
including the faithful Morris, in tears, and the Hopkins
group in a turmoil. ‘ You are truly a “ Wandering Willie
wrote Pepper, ‘ but as long as your peregrinations carry
you only from one peak on to a higher one your friends and
admirers can only rejoice in your continued progress ’ ;
and Weir Mitchell : ‘ If this is true I shall not congratulate
myself or the profession, for I think you were made for
a doctor not a college president ’ ; and H. C. Wood :

‘ Have you agreed to take it ? Must we soon take off our
hats to Sir William, and how much small beer must you

410 Teaching; Observing: Recording Jan. 1895

imbibe before your lithe swarthy form can grow and swell
and swell and grow to the proper dimensions of a Britannic
“ Sir ” ? If so, farewell.’ He dismissed all this with his
usual brevity, as in the following to Lafleur :

I enclose the copy of Holmes’s poem. We returned here to find
quite an excitement about the rumoured appointment at McGill.
The Associated Press had telegraphed from Montreal that I had
been appointed and there was no end of disturbance. I had a
delightful visit with you all up there, and it was a great pleasure
to see my old friends again.

The caU,^ one may be assured, was not lightly declined,
but decisions came quickly to him. ‘ Executive work has
never been in my line,’ he wrote to Ogden ; and there
was much else to occupy his mind and pen. Though
pegging away at this time at the first revision of his Text-
book, he meanwhile found relaxation in other and more
agreeable literary tasks. In this month of J anuary two of
his best biographical essays were presented before the
Historical Society of the hospital : one on ‘ Thomas Dover,
Physician and Buccaneer ’ — of Dover’s Powder fame ;
another entitled ‘ An Alabama Student ’ ; and a third on
John Keats was given later in the year at the October
meeting of the same club. He had probably encountered
Thomas Dover during his summer’s quest for records of
Sydenham in the British Museum, for Dover before making
his fortune in the South Seas ^ had been one of Sydenham’s
pupils. While browsing around a subject, Osier fairly
lapped up information, and there is evidence in the essay
to show that in his pursuit of Dover’s medical writings,
which had made such a great noise in London in their day,
he had gone to libraries beyond the British Museum and in
his collateral reading had wandered even into Smollett’s

^ Nor was this the only one, for efforts were made the same month to
attract him to New York City by the offer of a university post there.

® It has been said that the success of this privateering voyage was what led
up to the establishment of the South Sea Company, and, before the bubble
burst, one Thomas Guy, a heavy participant, had sold his stock, thereby
providing himself with the fortune subsequently bequeathed to found Guy’s
Hospital. This famous institution, therefore, may trace its origin to the
sack of Guayaquil, as famed in later days for its yellow fever as in the early
eighteenth century for its yellow gold.

Aet.45 Immortality on a Powder 41 1

^ Peregrine Pickle \ It must suffice to quote his introduc-
tory paragraph :

As ^ Sir Thomas Browne remarks in the Hydriotaphia : ‘ The
iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with
the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.’
Thus it happens that Thomas Dover, the Doctor, has drifted into
our modern life on a powder label (to which way of entering the
company of posterity, though sanctified by Mithridates, many
would prefer oblivion, even to continuous immortality on a powder
so potent and palatable as the Pulvts Ipecacuanhae composttus) ; while
Thornas Dover, the Buccaneer, third in command, one of the
principal owners, and president of the Council of the Duke and
Duchess — ^privateers of the ancient and honourable city of Bristol —
discoverer of Alexander Selkirk (the original Robinson Crusoe), in
spite of more enduring claims on our gratitude, has been forgotten. . . .

What led him to become interested in the story of ^ An
Alabama Student a mid-century surgeon of the Southern
States, was related in the essay in his own words as follows :

When looking over the literature of malarial fevers in the South, ^
chance threw in my way Fenner’s Southern Medical Reports ^ Vols. I
and II, which were issued in 1849-50 and 1850-1. Among many
articles of interest, I was particularly impressed with two by Dr,
John Y. Bassett of Huntsville, Alabama, in whom I seemed to
recognize a ‘ likeness to the wise below a ^ kindred with the great
of old I wrote to Huntsville to ascertain what had become of
Dr. Bassett, and my correspondent referred me to his daughter from
whom I received a packet of letters written from Paris in 1836,
I have her permission to make the extracts which are here given. . . .

He gave a stirring and appreciative account of this un-
usual man, rescuing his story from among those forgotten
and making him for all time one of the heroes of the
^ medicine of the Southland an example to all young
students of medicine, of what courage, persistence, and
industry may accomplish in the face of difficulties and
discouragements. He closes the essay with the following
paragraph :

The saddest lament in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poems is for the
voiceless —

for those who never sing
But die with all their music in them.

^ Cf ‘ The Study of the Fevers of the South.’ Journal of the American
Medical AssoctatioUy 1896, xxi. 999-1004.

412 Teaching: Observing: Recording Spring 1895

The extracts which I have read show Dr. Bassett to have been a man
of more than ordinary gifts, but he was among the voiceless of the
profession. Nowadays environment, the opportunity for work, the
skirts of happy chance carry men to the summit. To those restless
spirits who have had ambition without opportunities, and ideals not
realizable in the world in which they move, the story of his life may
be a solace. I began by saying that I would tell you of a man of
whom you had never heard, of a humble student from a little town
in Alabama. What of the men whom he revered, and for whom in
1836 he left wife and children? Are they better known to us?
To-day scarcely one of those whom he mentions touches us with
any firmness from the past. Of a majority of them it may be said,
they are as though they had not been. Velpeau, Andral, Broussais,
the great teachers whom Bassett followed, are shadowy forms (almost
as indistinct as the pupil), dragged out to daylight by some laudator
tem^oris acti^ who would learn philosophy in history. To have
striven, to have made an effort, to have been true to certain ideals —
this alone is worth the struggle. Now and again in a generation
one or two snatch something from dull oblivion ; but for the rest
of us, sixty years — we, too, are with Bassett and his teachers, and

no one asks

Who or what we have been,

More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost ocean, have swelled.

Foamed for a moment, and gone.

The surviving daughter of the Alabama Student, Miss
Laura Bassett, who had solicited a picture of the author
of the essay, wrote : ‘You have a different look from what
I had imagined and I have not done you justice in any
respect, except from an intellectual standpoint. The
rotund, bald-headed, eagle-eyed and -nosed Dr., with
a slightly dictatorial manner now gives way before the real
and true picture.’ But neither brush nor camera ever
caught the real and true Osier, for a mask of imperturba-
bility concealed the real man capable of flashes of gaiety and
outrageous pranks, somewhat mystifying to those who were
incapable of seeing beneath the surface. Sir Edward
Schafer, his old friend of University College days, writes :

Ever since I knew Osier — as quite a young man — he had always
the same quiet serious manner, with unperturbed features and dark-
complexioned almost expressionless face — so that strangers were
entirely unprepared for the humour which would sally forth at the

Aet. 45 That I may not Weep 413

most unexpected times, without any relaxation of countenance or
any change in tone of voice : indeed, people sometimes would take
a remark which was entirely jocular au grand serieux, and wonder
that it should have been made by so sedate and learned a person. . . .

What is more, behind his mask there lay a tender, affection-
ate, sympathetic, almost sentimental heart, whose emotions
he had trained himself to disguise. There is a story told
of how he offended some good people in the early days in
Baltimore by humming a tune — as near as he could get to
one — on leaving the sickroom of a man, evidently near his
end, whom he had been asked to see in consultation. His
attention was drawn to this lapse by the doctor who had
called him in, with the hint that such unheard-of behaviour
would make him an undesirable consultant, and he merely
replied, in Uncle Toby’s words : ‘ ’Tis that I may not
weep.’ It was not for want of thought that he whistled as
he went. So in his letters, when mentioning some sorrow,
even that of the loss of his son, which, years later, broke him
beyond words, whatever his inward feelings, he disguised
them outwardly, and with the gesture of putting sorrow
behind him he quickly turned to other things. Thus in
a note scribbled to Ogden early in March he mentions his
father’s death :

Delighted ! But you must stay a week at least. Plenty of room
& a hearty welcome & I want you to meet Mrs. O. My father died
two weeks ago — arteriosclerosis. Sorry to hear that you have had
a cold — the trip will do you good. If you have any memoranda for
2nd edition of my Quiz Compend — bring them as I am working at it.

The 97th annual session of the Medical and Chirurgical
Faculty of Maryland; — the last meeting to be held in its
old hall on the corner of St. Paul and Saratoga Streets —
fell on April 23rd, when a symposium was held at Osier’s
suggestion on the subject of ‘ Typhoid Fever in Country
Districts ’. He opened the session with a paper in which he
urged the regular inspection of dairy farms, measures to
prevent the contamination of the water supply, and the
compulsory notification of every case of typhoid before an
official State Board of Health. These were radical recom-
mendations, and in no uncertain terms he gave warning that
the Baltimore death-rate from typhoid never would be

414 Teaching: Observing: Recording May 1895

reduced to the ratio of modern cities until the local cesspool
system of drainage was completely abolished and the city
took over control of the watersheds of the Gunpowder
River and Jones’s Falls. He had good reason to enter the
lists in favour of these necessary reforms, for at the time
Arthur Oppenheim, one of his assistant residents, was lying
ill at the hospital with what proved to be a fatal attack of
this preventable malady ; nor was he to be the only victim
of typhoid among the hospital family.^

The ‘ Faculty ’ meeting was the opening gun of the
succession of medical meetings — appalling even in the ’90’s —
which signalize the closing months of the school year.
A short-lived body, the American Academy of Medicine,
held a session in Baltimore, May 4th-6th, in one of the
halls of the University — an occasion which need be noted
only in so far as to explain that Osier, who probably dis-
pensed hospitality to the members, was not only elected an
honorary member but was penalized by being made Presi-
dent of an affiliated and comparatively new Society — the
Association of American Medical Colleges.

. On the heels of these preliminaries came the Baltimore
meeting of the American Medical Association, a formidable
body for any community to entertain. The meeting, or,
more properly speaking, one of its business sessions, was
noteworthy from the sidelight it casts upon the subject of
this memoir. As a rule, if righting wrongs involved other
people’s feelings. Osier preferred to do these things man
to man ; but on a few occasions he flared out in public
with an expostulation against an obvious wrong. On this
particular occasion he was moved to say openly what
others felt but dared not express. A worthy but incom-
petent old man. Dr. W. B. Atkinson, had been Secretary
of the Association for thirty-one years and, as had happened
several times before, the Committee on Nominations had
reported in favour of a successor. According to the constitu-
tion, however, the Secretary could only be retired from
office by death, resignation, or removal by a two-thirds
vote of those present. The Secretary’s supporters all spoke

^ At the McGill Convocation, April 30th, Osier in absentia (probably
because of Oppenheim’s illness) was given his first LL.D.

Aet. 45

Fiat Justitia 415

in his favour and one of them had made a long appeal to
the effect that the sentiment of the Association was ^Jiat
justitia — exact justice and mercy to every one urging the
assembly to sustain the existing Secretary. The question
was to be put, when Osier rose from the floor of the house —
indeed, stood on his chair the better to be heard. The
Journal of the Association, for May 18, 1895, in its official
account of the proceedings, reads as follows :

The President — ^Are you ready for the question? (Cries of
Question ! Question !)

Dr. Osier — Fiat justitia for the Association is all right, but let
the quality of mercy be not strained. I stand here and say plainly
and honestly before Dr. Atkinson what I and many other members
have said behind his back, that he is not an efficient Secretary of
this Association, and that we have not found him so, (Hisses, followed
by applause.) You may hiss if you will, but I unhesitatingly say that
no more important step in advance will be taken by this Association
than when it changes its Secretary. (Cries of Question 1 Question !)

President Maclean put the motion that the present incumbent
remain in office, and it was carried by a large majority.

This account — a very mild rendering of an episode which
stirred the Association to its depths — fails to record what
then happened, for Osier left his seat, walked up on to the
platform and, shaking Dr. Atkinson^s hand, said things to
him one would know that he would say.^

During all this time, as told in the following letter, he
was pegging away at other matters, not the least onerous
of which was the first triennial revision of his Text-book.
He writes Lafleur on May 21st :

I have been hard at work this winter on purpura and purpuric
affections, for a set of lectures. I have had such an interesting round
of cases this year. By the way, I am over head and ears revising my
text-book, and nearly finished. Had you not a number of additional
corrections ? If so, please send them on as soon as possible. I shall
be reading proofs all summer — and swearing. My monograph on
Chorea was sent you from Blakiston’s ; at least Miss Humpton has
it on her list, but I have ordered another one. There are one or
two points of interest in it, particularly the mottoes from the two
old sinners [Bouteille and Bernt],

^ Osier’s spectacular pronouncement at this time served its purpose.
The agitation it provoked only subsided five years later when George
H. Simmons was elected Secretary.

41 6 Teaching: Observing; Recording Summer 1895

Though over head and ears in his revision, he managed to
get away for two other meetings near the close of the month.
On the 28th he read a paper on a little-understood malady
associated with chronic peritonitis, before the American
Pediatric Society, which met this year at the Virginia Hot
Springs ; and two days later he was in Washington for the
tenth annual meeting of the Association of American
Physicians, over which body he presided. It is not to be
wondered at that the presidential address for the year
was a rather perfunctory affair ; nor was the programme
a particularly exciting one,^ and in all likelihood the pre-
siding officer had abundant occasion to scribble ‘ James
Bovell, M D M R C P ’ on his pad. So the spring passed,
followed by a hot Baltimore June, which saw the completion
of the revision. It had necessitated much labour and, as
always, abundant rewriting, though in some fashion he
managed, in this as in all other revisions, to keep the volume
from expanding.

It is probable that a more vivid memoir of William Osier
might be written could letters from his wife be recovered.
Extracts from one of them written to Ogden on June 14th
give a picture from behind the scenes of what had been
going on at i West Franklin Street since Ogden’s long-
promised visit of a few weeks before. It says :

. . . You should see him now. He is deep in the new edition. The
first package of manuscript has gone and soon the misery of proof
reading will begin. The library is a perfect wreck — floor, tables
& chairs covered with books & journals. After you left, my mother
soon departed, and she was followed by one relation & friend after
another and I only had time to catch my breath and be ready for
that — (you know) American Med. Asso. Our plans were changed
somewhat as Dr. Osier’s sister-in-law died very suddenly and we of
course did not take part in any of the entertainments — and Dr. Osier
recalled his dinner invitations. Dr. Donald Maclean [A. M. A.
President for the year] and his wife stayed here, also Dr. and Mrs.
McGuire from Richmond. I hesitate to express my opinion about
the A. M. A. probably yours is the same. Thank goodness it cannot
come here again while we live here. . . . Dr. Osier distinguished

^ Except for Welch’s discussion of that recent epochal discovery — the
treatment of diphtheria by antitoxin, subsequently much elaborated in the
Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1895, vi. 47.

Aet. 45 The Misery of Proof-reading 417

himself by maligning old Atkinson the Secretary — was at the
meeting and frightened to death when I heard him pronounce the
Secretary absolutely incompetent \ It was a benefit to the Associa-
tion I am told, but I fail to see it. We are miserable at remaining
in America this summer but proof must be read and some money
saved this year. Dr. Osier says he cannot leave until the middle
of July.

The summer months — after ^ the middle of July ’ at
least — were passed quietly at ^ The Glades ^ on the Scituate
shore of Massachusetts Bay, and while there, as the letters
scribbled to his Resident Physician indicate, he finished his
proof-reading, made plans for other work, and kept his
finger on medical affairs at the Hopkins, where preparations
were under way for the long-anticipated clinical teaching
of the undergraduates iust entering their third year :

Sunday [no date].

Dear Thayer, Do what you like about Camac. The question is
tho, whether Lazear would have enough to do with the Bacteriology
alone — It would do him good to have the ward at the same time,
say, & without any Dispensary work. I finished the proofs yesterday
[the second edition of the Text-book]. There has been a delay with
the new cuts, but I hope to have the index in hand by the i8th
and should have the work ready for distribution by Sept. 15th.
We leave for Toronto next Sunday, address 83 Wellesley Street.
We go to Canton Mass, to Mrs Revere’s on Wednesday eve. This
is a delightful place, so quiet 8 c secluded 8 c the headers off the rocks
into deep water have renewed my youth. Mrs. Osier keeps very
well. I hope you are arranging to leave on a fast SS. Sept. nth.
You could have 2 weeks in England 8 c a few days in Cambridge on
your return 5c be back in the hospital by the izth of October an
extra week would do you no harm. I am glad that they are pushing
on with the alterations It will be a great comfort to have Futcher
in charge 5c doing special work. I have almost finished the Typhoid
histories of the past two years. There will be nearly enough for
a serviceable fasciculus with the paper on Neuritis, which I read
last winter, Blumer’s paper on Pyuria 5 c if I can get Halsted to put
Parsons’ paper in also. Love to all the boys. Yours W, O.

Osier was forever smoothing the path for others, and few
men have been more active in getting up testimonial
dinners or in celebrating anniversaries of friends and col-
leagues in some such way, or by having their portraits
painted. He had an unerring flair which enabled him to

2923 I E e

41 8 Teaching: Observing: Recording Summer 1895

foresee before others when words of encouragement or
appreciation were needed, and when appropriate. It was
in this year that the Congressional subsidy was withdrawn
from the Iniex Meiicus, the great monthly index of
the world’s medical literature which Dr. Billings had
started ; and with the object of finding some means of
continuance of the publication, Osier had introduced
resolutions at the A. M. A. meeting in June, urging the
members to subscribe. But this was largely in vain,^ for,
after struggling along with uncertain financial support for
a few years, publication was suspended until 1903 when,
at Weir Mitchell’s insistence, it was resumed under the
patronage of the Carnegie Institute, with Dr. Fletcher as
editor-in-chief. In this same year, too, was completed the
last volume of the first series of the great ‘ Index Catalogue ’
of the Surgeon-General’s Library, with its author- and sub-
ject-titles in excess of a million — one of the world’s great
indexes and a monument to Billings’s imagination and
industry. Billings’s part in this was not to be forgotten ;
from the Glades Club, Osier writes to James R. Chadwict :

In what condition is the Billings testimonial ? And in what form
is the presentation to be made? Possibly you may know — possibly
not ; but what I feel is that we should have some general gathering
on the occasion of the issue of the last volume of the Index Catalogue ;
a dinner would be best. I think I spoke to you about it last year,
but this money testimonial came up & Mitchell had an idea that the
College of Physicians, PhUa, would give an entertainment & that
the presentation might then be made. I shall be in town next week
& will call on the chance of finding you.

A short sojourn with Mrs. Osier’s mother in Canton,
near Boston, was followed by a visit to his own mother in
Toronto. He had invited innumerable friends, children
of friends, and nephews and nieces to see him there ; but
the chief responsibility for their entertainment devolved
upon his gracious wife, for, as often happened, he uncere-
moniously slipped away to attend a medical meeting. This
time it was to Kingston, where the Canadian Medical
Association met on August 27th, and where he read the

^ According to J. S. Billings’s open letter in the autumn, only thirty
subscriptions at S25 a year had been received.

Aet.46 The Saint — Johns Hopkins 419

paper on cold bathing in typhoid — a portion of the report
he had been working over during the summer.

On his return to Baltimore, early in September, he
writes to Lafleur : ‘ Back again with the typhoid &
malaria. Wards full. I am just issuing a second report
on Typhoid F ever ^ which will contain some interesting
papers.’ If nothing else had come out of the clinic during
the year, this report by itself would have made a most
creditable showing. Som.e of the beautiful lithographic
plates illustrating its several articles were signed ‘Max Brddel
fee .’’ — a name which the year before had begun to appear
under the illustrations which accompanied articles from the
Hopkins clinic. Mr. Brodel had been induced to come to
Baltimore from Leipzig, and in the course of the next
decade revolutionized the art of medical illustrating. This,
however, is another story, and his name is introduced here
chiefly to account for the often-reproduced drawing he
made showing Osier with halo and wings dominating
a cyclone which swept away disease. It bore the legend,

‘ 'The Saint — Johns Hopkins HospitaV, a play upon Osier’s
frequent reference to the hospital as ‘ the St. Johns ’.

Though he responded at times to professional calls which
took him out of town — calls which he always enjoyed, for
he was a good traveller and could rest, as well as read and
compose, on trains almost better than at home, where
interruptions were frequent — for the most part his private
practice was confined to a few consultations by appoint-
ment between 2 and 4.30 p.m. at i West Franklin Street.
After his tea he occasionally saw a patient or two in com-
pany with some Baltimore physician, but more often he
repaired to the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty Library
for an hour’s reading or to engage in some committee
work. There were, however, a few people whom he visited

^ This aad the ‘ Typhoid fasciculus ’ reference in the last letter to Thayer
relate to the ten papers published this year in the last half of vol. v of the
Hospital Reports — a matter of 200 pages, quarto, 100 of them from Osier’s
pen. Six of the ten topics he dealt with himself, and the other contributors
were George Blumer, Simon Flexner, Walter Reed, and H. C. Parsons. The
first half of this volume was given over to the comprehensive study, to which
his letters so often refer, by Thayer and Hewetson of the malarial fevers of
Baltimore, and to L. F. Barker’s report on some of the fatal cases.

420 Teaching : Observing : Recording Sept. 1895

at tlieir homes as much a friend as physician. One of them,
a near neighbour, confesses that she would venture to
summon him only when she had a temperature of 103®,
and a conversation somewhat as follows would ensue :
^ What ’s wrong? ’ ^ In bed with a fever.’ ^ Why don’t
you open a window? ’ Because then I’d be cold.’ ^ But
you could put on a wrap ; what have you got to read ? ’
So for the few precious moments more agreeable things
than symptoms would be talked about until, with a wave
of the hand he would vanish, to be welcomed with shouts
of glee in the nursery, with whose inmates he was sure to
frolic for a moment before leaving the house. This autumn
a new arrival had come to this particular nursery, for
whom he had been asked to suggest a name, and he wrote ;

I feel sure that when the little lassie reaches years of discretion
the name of Doris will please her greatly. Then it is Greek & the
more we can revert, even in nomenclature, to that wonderful people
the better for our modern life. The shadow of the Shemite is still
upon us. Let us hope that as Doris she may reach the Greek ideal
of a fair mind in a fair body, and be, indeed, as the word indicates,
a gift. I hope your mother keeps comfortable. Dr. Smith should see
her occasionally & I will look in now & again to see that all goes well.

Years later the mother of this child Doris penned these
recollections of Osier as a physician — ^ a giver of life ’ :

To have been a patient of Sir William Osier in your youth was to
have obtained an almost impossible ideal of what a physician could
be. . . . As he passed about, gallant and debonair, with a whimsical
wit that left the air sweet and gay, with an epigram here and a
paradox there, tickling the ribs of his colleagues, none felt him
frivolous : there was a point to his rapier for all he played with the
button on. The deep, sad eyes of his soul watched a little cynically
the light humour of his mind. It was not necessary for him to be
sensitive to a social atmosphere, because he always made his own
atmosphere. In a room full of discordant elements he entered and
saw only his patient and only his patient’s greatest need, and instantly
the atmosphere was charged with kindly vitality, everyone felt that
the situation was under control, and all were attention. No circum-
locution, no meandering. The moment Sir William gave you was
yours. It was hardly ever more than a moment, but there was
curiously no abrupt beginning or end to it. With the easy sweep
of a great artist’s line, beginning in your necessity and ending in
your necessity, the precious moment was yours, becoming wholly

A Giver of Life

Aet. 46

421

and entirely a part of the fabric of your life. He made you respect
his time, but he also respected yours. If he said : ^ I will come at
two and the hands of the clock pointed to ten minutes after, you
knew that he could not come. And if that rare thing happened —
a broken appointment — ^he never failed to send a few lines of explana-
tion. He safeguarded his patient from all annoyance. To be sure,
you could not luxuriate into floating reminiscences in his company :
your expansions about your family and friends and temperament
were not for him — that the nurse had to bear. I think he was
always a little sorry for the nurse. One other thing he safeguarded,
and that was your purse. If a conscientious secretary sent a bill, it
had to be a very moderate affair.

With his patients he recognized at once the thing or characteristic
that concerned him and them ; and for the rest, whatever was
uncongenial or unattractive he put from his mind and prevented
any expression of it. A pose or an attempt at a serious chatter
about unessentials was intolerable to him. But he was as merciful
as he was masterful, and from the very poor and the genuinely
afflicted he would even have borne being bored.

Such telling love, such perfect confidence were given him that he
could do what he liked without causing offence. Three times in
my life I have seen him, when in consultation, smash the attending
physician’s diagnosis and turn the entire sick-room the other way
about ; but he left the room with his arm about the corrected
physician’s neck, and they seemed to be having a delightful time.
The reason for this was perfectly evident : every physician felt
himself safe in Sir William’s hands ; he knew that he could by no
possibility have a better friend in the profession ; that if, with the
tip of his finger, Sir William gaily knocked down his house of cards,
he would see to it that the foundation was left solid ; and no one
would contribute so many bricks to the new edifice. . . . He was one
of those who having great possessions, gave all that he had. For
myself, I may say that every moment he gave me shines out, illuminat-
ing the long years of my life.

Subtle in temperament, direct in character, the brilliant mind
and soaring spirit were unchallenged, because, under the surface of
the gay man of the world, lived the Saint, It is when a man touches
other people’s lives that you know whether he brings life or death
or nothing. Where that swift spirit has gone I do not know ; but
I know that to those he cared for on earth he brought life. They
will look back and remember, and will thank God and take courage.

To H. J. Lafleur from W. 0 . i West Franklin Street,

Sunday [Oct. 19, 1895].

I wish you were here this evening. Thayer and little Billie are
reading in comfortable chairs & the former has just been reciting

422 Teaching: Observing: Recording Oct. 1895

Lowells commemoration ode. We have had a very sad week. Poor
Emery went off suddenly in an attack of Angina which began at
350 on Monday, & continued severely thro the night. In the morn-
ing he was better & passed the day comfortably. On Wednesday
a m a few minutes after I had seen him & while Thayer & the faithful
Gus were helping him he fell over on the bed & died in a few minutes.
He was buried at Waverley — Barker & I went down to the funeral.
We shall all miss him very much — there was a good heart beneath
the rough exterior. I hope by this time you have the 2 nd
edition of my text-book — there was an unfortunate delay in the
binding & distributing. Love to all the boys.

Something of the phenomenal success of the Text-book
iriaj' be gathered from the fact that about 23,000 copies of
the first edition had been sold, a remarkable record for
a medical publication. From the preface of the new
edition in which he makes his many acknowledgements
may be gathered how extensive had been the additions and
alterations, and on the fly-leaf of his personal interleaved
copy of this second edition he pencilled a note giving what
he calls his ‘ “ Boodle ” Account with D. Appleton & Co.’
Some one, some day, could well write a volume devoted to
a study of the successive editions of this famous work, which
continues to exercise an enormous influence on students of
medicine — even on those beyond English-reading countries
through its many translations.^ Its influence, indeed,
extended far beyond the profession and led to many
important side issues which had better be deferred. To
one of them, however, reference may be made here, since
it concerned the future of one of Welch’s assistants. The
post of Pathologist at Jefferson had been offered to Flexner,
and Osier had advised him to accept on the grounds that
‘ good billets in this country are so few it might be many
years before another so favourable chance offered itself’.
It was mistaken advice, for only a few years later another
position in Philadelphia was proffered, and ere long the
second edition of Osier’s ‘ Practice of Medicine ’ got in its
work in an unexpected quarter, paving the way for some-
thing far more important not only to Flexner but to
the Johns ^ Hopkins and to American medicine as well

an allusion to matters which had better come in their

^ French (1908), German (1909), Chinese (1910 and 1921), Spanish (1915).

Aet.46 The Many-sided Osier 423

chronological order : the Baltimore fire, the Rockefeller
Institute, and large gifts of money in the cause of public
health.

From this digression concerning the Text-book we may
turn again to its author who, with his publishers warded off
for another three years, was interested in other matters.
There was nothing of the single-track nature about Osier’s
mind, and he was capable of keeping many things moving
at the same time towards their objectives. So, during the
summer outing he had switched alternately from the slow-
moving text-book revision to the typhoid fasciculus and to
the more agreeable companionship of ‘John Keats: the
Apothecary Poet ’ — one-time surgical ‘ dresser ’ in Guy’s
Hospital under the celebrated Sir Astley Cooper, on which
basis the medical profession, with some justification, enrolls
him among its own. He had been reading the new edition,
by Forman, of Keats’s letters, meanwhile saturating himself
with the poems, and the details of Keats’s life, in full
sympathy and understanding with one ‘ who unhappily had
missed the Sfes fhthisica that has carried so many con-
sumptives cheerfully to the very gates of the grave ’. So
in October on the centenary of Keats’s birth, before the
Hospital Historical Club he gave his appreciative account ^
of the man who ‘ is numbered among the inheritors
of unfulfilled renown with Catullus and Marlowe, with
Chatterton and Shelley, whom we mourn as doubly dead
in that they died so young ’.

But the many-sided Osier could turn from the sublime
to the ridiculous, and though not given to throwing off
fugitive verses he was guilty of doing so a month later when
with the sonnet on Chapman’s ‘ Homer ’ in his ears he
paraphrased it in describing a well-remembered episode of
the time. Politics in Baltimore was then at its very lowest
ebb of unrighteousness. Both parties, no doubt, were
equally bad and thoroughly boss-ridden, but the Democrats
under the notorious Gorman happened to be in control ;
gangsters and ‘ repeaters ’ would invade precincts known to
have a Republican majority and would see that sufficient
Democratic votes were turned in to defeat their opponents.

^ Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin^ Jan. 1896.

424 Teaching : Observing : Recording Nov. 1895

Accordingly, a good many of the Hopkins men under
H. A. Kelly’s leadership constituted a reform party which
volunteered to police the polls. Kelly himself chose the
Marsh Market for his station, the very hot-bed of the
troubles ; and wearing a long ulster and knickerbockers he
appeared, a marked man, amid the roughs and hoodlums
of this 17 th Ward, who were ‘ sicked on ’ by their local
boss. A fight ultimately occurred, some one’s jaw was
fractured — not Dr. Kelly’s — and it may suffice to say that
the grip of the political ring was also broken ; but all of
this is merely to explain the following lines sent to the
University President ;

xi. 6. 95.

Dear Mr. Gilman, The Dean has been distributing these 6c has
had the audacity to use my 'tioni-d e-plume ^ E. Y. D., which is copy-
righted. Yours sincerely,

OSLER.

The Marsh Market

Nov. 5th.

(With apologies to the late Mr. Keats)

Much have I travelled in the realms of toughs,

And many dirty towns and precincts seen ,

Round many a ward industrious have I been,

Which bears in fealty to the bosses hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That wide-os’d Gorman ruled as his demesne ;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Abel speak out loud and bold ;

Then felt I like some watcher of the polls
When a repeater swims into his ken.

Or like stout Kelly when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Marsh Market — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
And said — Let us^ too^ vote again !

E. Y. D.

The testimonial banquet to John S. Billings, referred to
in an earlier letter and with which Osier and Weir Mitchell
had the most to do, was held the last day of the month at
the Hotel Bellevue, Philadelphia. During the course of
the dinner, Mitchell, after a witty speech, presented the
guest of honour with a silver box containing a cheque for
$10,000, ‘ from 259 physicians of the United States and

Aet.46 Ephemerides 425

Great Britain in grateful recognition of his services to
medical scholars ’ ; and after other speeches had been
made Osier rose and stated that ^ though Dr. Billings had
left Washington^ his counterfeit presentment would appear
on the walls of the Library, for a sufficient fund had been
raised for the purpose ’d

Many medical papers were published during the year,
often on topics previously used for a clinical lecture or for
some meeting at the hospital, the Maryland Faculty or
elsewhere. They need not be enumerated.^ He had begun
this December to write a number of short notes for the
Montreal Medical Journal^ entitled ^ Ephemerides six
monthly instalments of which appeared in the next year.^
These jottings consisted for the most part of comments
on unusual cases which, in increasing numbers, were being
brought to him for his opinion. In the introductory note
he says :

... A consultant’s life is not without unpleasant features, chief
among which is the passing of judgement on the unhappy incurables
— on the cancerous, ataxies, and paralytics, who wander from one
city to another. Few are able to receive the balm of truth, but now
and again one meets with a cheery, brave fellow, who insists upon
a plain, unvarnished statement of his prospects. Still more dis-
tressing are the instances of hopeless illness in which, usually for his
friends’ sake, the entire ^ faculty ’ is summoned. Can anything be

^ This portrait of Billings in full uniform and wearing the scarlet gown of
an Oxford D.C.L. was painted by Miss Cecilia Beaux and hangs in the
Surgeon-General’s Library.

^ Perhaps the most important of them was read before the Medical Society
of the District of Columbia, entitled ‘ The Practical Value of Laveran’s
Discoveries ’ (Medical News, Phila , Nov. 23, 1895), in which he deals with
vital statistics, reiterates the necessity of blood examinations, and states that
an intermittent fever which resists quinine is not malarial. Another was his
article ‘ On the Visceral Complications of Erythema Exudativum Multiforme ’
(Anencan Journal of Medical Sciences, Dec. 1895, cx. 629-46), also known
as Henoch’s purpura, the first of a series of papers on the visceral lesions of the
erythema group of skin diseases, a subject in which he for long was greatly
interested.

^ Montreal Medical Journal, Jan. 1896, xxiv. 518. In the course of these
ephemeral notes he touched on a great variety of topics, and in one of them
on ‘ Tobacco Angina ’ in the April issue he refers to his own indulgence in
tobacco, which as a matter of fact was always in great moderation a'hd was for
the most part restricted to a post-prandial cigarette or two.

426 Teaching: Observing: Recording 1895-6

more doleful than a procession of four or five doctors into the sick
man’s room ? Who does not appreciate Matthew Arnold’s wish ? —

Nor bring to see me cease to live

Some doctor full of phrase and fame.

To shake his sapient head, and give
The ill he cannot cure, a name.

How often under such circumstances has the bitterness of the last
line occurred to me !

Towards the end of the year there had been absurd
rumours of war arising from the dispute over the Venezuela^
Guiana boundary, Mr. Cleveland at the time in no un-
certain terms having called the attention of the British
Government to what it "regarded as a piece of American
impertinence — namely the Monroe Doctrine. Osier, it
may be recalled, during his sojourn in the States never
became a naturalized citizen, and it is evident from his
various letters that he always anticipated ending his days
in Montreal. It would be an awkward business for me as
I am still British to the core ^ he remarked in one of his
letters, and the day after Christmas he wrote to Ogden :

Dear O. Thanks for the delightful edition of Omar. I had not
seen it. The sketch of ^ Old Fitz ’ is charming. Your mother keeps
wonderfully well & Bloodgood says the knee could not be better.
I will send the Dover shortly — it comes out in the Jan. no of the
Bulletin. I will send two or three repimts. Mrs Osier is very well.
... we had a very quiet Xmas together. Willie went home. May
comes out for a visit in January. Damn these politicians : if they
raise a war, ’twill play the devil with me. I should go back & stand
by the boys. Happy New Year.

But there was a pleasanter end for the year than this
rumour of an international misunderstanding, for on
December 28th his son Revere was born.

1896

‘ Mrs. Osier had a small boy last week — both are doing
splendidly. We are of course delighted, and he looks
a strong and durable specimen.’ In this casual fashion, to
his old friend of London days, he announced the birth
of his son ; but Schafer knew full well how devoted he was

Revere’s Birth

Aet. 46

427

to children and must have been able to read between the
lines. Something of his feelings may be gathered from
a letter of January 3rd from Mrs. Osier to the child’s
grandmother Osier, who at ninety years of age had
had abundant experience with grandchildren — even great-
grandchildren :

. . . You must please excuse the proud father if he leaves unsaid
what you want to know, for he is really very much excited. On
New Year’s day he told me in the most solemn manner that he had
not kissed the baby yet, but was going to then. Before he left last
night he said he had kissed him five times. He brings all his medical
friends up to look at him. ... I hope you will be pleased to hear
that we have decided to call him Edward Revere Osier. We were
thinking very seriously of it, and Brit [B. B. Osier, who was in Balti-
more on a visit] has clinched it by telling me that he knows you will
approve. My youngest brother is Edward, and I am particularly
attached to him. Willie is very anxious to have Revere in the name,
and says it is more important to have a name the child will be satisfied
with when he grows up, than to follow any great sentiment. At
first I was quite anxious to call him Palmer Howard, but now I am
more than content, as I hear that this will be the fifth generation
of Edward Osiers, and I know that my brother will be very much
pleased. Tell the little Auntie [Miss Jennette Osier] that Willie
says she is to feel a particular share in the boy, as he will have her
father’s name. . , •

For the remainder of Osier’s life, this boy, Revere, the
source of his greatest happiness — and whose loss was his
greatest sorrow — was uppermost in his father’s mind, and
in writing to his more intimate friends he never failed to
make some reference to the child as ^ Tommy ’ or ^ Isaac ’
or ^ Ike ’ or ^ Egerton, Jr.’

On January nth of this year the exercises were held
commemorating the opening of the new hall (at 847 North
Eutaw Street) of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty. It
was the first migration of the old Society which this com-
parative new-comer in Maryland medical circles had done
so much to revivify. The month before, he had written
to Dr. James Chadwick in Boston :

After many struggles the old Medical Sc Chiiurgical Faculty of
Maryland has at last secured a local habitation. They have a library
of about 10,000 volumes, and we are very anxious to stir up the

428 Teaching: Observing; Recording jan. 1896

profession to take an interest in it, and to contribute more largely
than they do. We propose to have at some time in January a formal
opening, and I have been requested to ask whether you would not
give a short address on a library, its use, and development? Any
date in January which would be convenient to you we could arrange
for the opening. If you come, of course you will be my guest, and
I will ask the Trustees of the Faculty to meet you at dinner. Please
do not say no, as you will never again have an opportunity of doing
so good a piece of missionary work. The profession heie needs to
be stirred up a bit.

As orator of the occasion, Chadwick in his address on
‘ Medical Libraries ’ did what Osier had anticipated,
stirred the old ‘ Faculty ’ to its depths, and the records
of the occasion state that added enthusiasm was aroused
‘ when the speaker offered to make a contribution to the
Faculty Fund if others present would do the same, and
within a few minutes $3,500 was collected ’. It may be
presumed that this was the outcome of a conspiracy pre-
arranged at I West Franklin Street.

The third-year clinical teaching for the fifteen survivors
of the first entering class was by this time in full swing, and
Osier’s unusual gifts as an inspirer of youth began for the
first time to be appreciated at their real worth. To be
sure, in Montreal and Philadelphia these gifts had been
apparent, as they had been during the preceding five years
in Baltimore when he was restricted to graduate teaching ;
but from this time on, in control of his own clinic, his
extraordinary talents had full play. His success lay far less
'in his thorough familiarity with his subject than it did
in his knowledge of young men and of himself. This
enabled him to impart something of what he knew in
such fashion as inevitably to spur students to take every
advantage of their opportunities — not the least of which
was that they might be near him.^

^ In the course of an address on March 22, 1920, given in Osier’s memory
at the Johns Hopkins University (the Johns Hopkins Ahmm Magazine, 1921,
IX. 296-313), William H. Welch, after discussing the qualities that gave Osier
his dominant position in medicine (‘ at the time of his death he was probably
the greatest figure in the medical world ; the best known, the most influential,
the most beloved ’), says further that Osier’s reputation, though founded on
his scientific work, does not rest solely upon that work, but largely upon the
inspiring and stimulating character of his clinical teaching. ‘ I doubt [he

Aet.46 The Observation Class 429

To be sure, the students at this time were not yet in
the wards, but a clinical laboratory had been built,^ with
T. B. Futcher in charge, and Osier had started his intro-
ductory ‘ observation clinics ’ which were held three morn-
ings each week, in a room under Ward H, convenient to
the dispensary. The accessories to these stimulating
exercises were negligible — chairs informally grouped around
a simple couch, a plain deal table, and Osier. Two or three
patients selected by his assistants from the morning’s
ambulatory clinic were in turn brought in — cases the
teacher had not seen — and his chief stress was laid on the
methods of examination. ‘ Don’t touch the patient —
state first what you see ; cultivate your powers of observa-
tion.’ And there would be an informal running comment,
practical, amusing, stimulating ; with apt illustrations and
allusions that served to fix indelibly on his hearers’ minds
the points of the lesson he desired to bring out. ‘ Strong,
go to the library and bring me Vol. V of Guy’s Hospital
Reports, and you’ll find an account of this on page — ’ &c.
‘Jones, what have you read in French or German this
week ? Nothing ? Well, report next time to the class from
the last Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift what Ewald says
bearing on this subject — ’ &c. And meanwhile, to the
mystification of one who might be looking over his shoulder,
^ James Bovell M.D. James Bovell M.D. M.R.C.P’ is
being scribbled across the blotter or pad beside him as he
patiently awaits the response of some student labouring
with a question.

Of late years there has been so much discussion, par-
ticularly in England, about the so-caUed unit system, that
Osier’s part in introducing it has been somewhat obscured.
In his address, so frequently quoted, and given years later

says] whether the history of medicine records a man who had greater influence
upon the students that came under his teaching. He inspired them with
a remarkable devotion and loyal affection. He was their example. His life
embodied his precepts, and his students cherished his words Cultivate
peace of mind, serenity, the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. Think not too
much of to-morrow, but of the work of to-day, the work which is immediately
before you ” ’

^ ‘Clinical Microscopy at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.’ British
Medical Journal, iS99j i- 69-70.

430 Teaching: Observing; Recording jan. 1896

in England^ he described what at the time was a novel
organization, in the following words :

The medical unit consisted of about seventy beds (the number
gradually increased to above one hundred), a large out-patient
department, and a clinical laboratory close to the chief wards. In
charge was the head, ex officio Professor of Medicine in the uni-
versity ; a resident staff of first, second and third assistants (nominated
by the professor), a fourth assistant in charge of the laboratory ; and,
in addition, four house physicians appointed annually. The first
assistant, a man of experience, remained for some years, and in the
absence of the chief was in complete control of the department.
He had rooms in the hospital and was paid £200 a year, half by the
hospital, half by the university. All of the assistants were engaged
in teaching and were paid. The appointments were for no fixed
period, and during the sixteen years of my control there were only
five first assistants : Dr. Lafleur, now Professor of Medicine at
McGill ; Dr. Thayer, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Johns
Hopkins Hospital ; Dr, Futcher, Associate Professor of Medicine
at the Johns Hopkins Hospital ; Dr. McCrae, Professor of Medicine
at Jefferson College, Philadelphia ; and Dr. Cole, at present Director
of the hospital connected with the Rockefeller Institute. In each
instance, these men had lived as junior and senior assistants in the
hospital for seven, eight, or more years. . . ,

I have always felt that the success which followed this experiment
— for such it was in hospital work in the United States, at any rate —
was due to the type of men we had as senior assistants in the various
departments. We chose the best that were to be had ; the nomina-
tion was in the hands of the chief of the department ; they were
given responsibility, encouraged to teach and to write, and their
professional development was promoted in eveiy way. An excellent
plan, greatly favoured by the Director of the hospital, Dr. Hurd,
was to allow the senior assistants every couple of years a vacation
of from four to six months to go abroad for study. The out-patient
section of the medical unit was in charge of a separate staff, usually
men who had been senior assistants and had gone into practice in
the city. There were three : each took two days a week and had
his own staff of three or four assistants, and all were directly engaged
in teaching. You may gather from this some idea of the size of
a medical unit and of the number of men at w'ork in it, at least
twenty-three or twenty-four when I left the hospital. This may be
said to be an impossible task for one man to control. Not at all :
it is all a question of organization, of subdivision of labour, and of
co-opeiation among workers and the introduction into a depart-
ment of modern business methods.

^ ‘The Hospital Unit in University Work.’ Lancet, Lond., 1911, i.
211-13.

Aet. 46 He Knew not Idleness 431

But this quotation gives no picture of the man who
moved on this background, except that it shows his instinc-
tive tendency to give chief credit to others. One of the
senior assistants of this day, W. S. Thayer, has given a fore-
ground view of the man himself, in so far as such an elusive
personality can be fastened to paper. In this sketch there is
an account of the masterful working system Osier put into his
life and maintained to the end, for he knew not idleness :

At 7 he rose ; breakfast before 8. At a few minutes before
9 he entered the hospital door. After a morning greeting to the
Superintendent, humming gaily, with arm passed through that
of his assistant, he started with brisk, springing step down the
corridor towards the wards. The other arm, if not waving gay or
humorous greetings to nurses or students as they passed, was thrown
around the neck or passed through the arm of another colleague or
assistant. One by one they gathered about him, and by the time
the ward was reached, the little group had generally grown like a small
avalanche.

The visit over, to the private ward. For the many convalescents,
or the nervous invalid whose mind needed diversion from self, some
lively, droll greeting or absurd remark or preposterous and puzzling
invention, and away to the next in an explosion of merriment, often
amid the laughing but vain appeals of the patient for an opportunity
to retaliate. For those who were gravely ill, few words, but a charm-
ing and reassuring manner. Then, running the gauntlet of a group
of friends or colleagues or students or assistants, all with problems
to discuss, he escaped. How ? Heaven only knows 1

A cold luncheon, always ready, shortly after i. Twenty minutes’
rest in his room ; then his afternoon hours. At half past four,
in the parlour opposite his consulting room, the clans began to
gather, graciously received by dear ‘Mrs. Chief’, as Lady Osier
was affectionately known. Soon ‘ the Chief’ entered with a familiar
greeting for all. It was an anxious moment for those who had been
waiting long for the word that they had been seeking with him.
After five or ten minutes he would rise, and perhaps beckon to the
lucky man to follow him to his study. More often he slipped quietly
from the room and in a minute reappeared at the door in his overcoat,
hat in hand. A gay wave of the hand, ‘ Good-bye and he was off
to his consultations.

Dinner at 7 to which impartially and often, his assistants were
invited. In the evening he did no set work, and retired early to
his study where, his wife by the fire, he signed letters and cleared
up the affairs of the day. Between 10 and ii o’clock, to bed.
Such were his days. Three mornings in the week he took at home

43^ Teaching: Observing: Recording Spring 1896

for work. He utilized every minute of his time. Much of his summer
vacation went to his studies. On railway, in cab, on his way to and
from consultations, in tramway, and in the old ^ bob-tailed ’ car
that used to carry us to the hospital, book and pencil were ever in
his hand, and wherever he was, the happy thought was caught on
the wing and noted down. His ability at a glance to grasp and to
remember the gist of the article that he read was extraordinary.

His power to hold the mastery of his time was remarkable. He
escaped as by magic, but so graciously, so engagingly that, despair
though one might, one could hardly be irritated. No one could speak
consecutively to Osier against his will. How did he do it ? I know
not.^

As yet there was no fourth-year teaching, and he con-
tinued therefore with his exercises for the post-graduates,
of whom there was always a goodly number. During
this winter semester a series of clinical lectures ^ was
delivered for their benefit on the subject of Angina
Pectoris and Allied States h This disease has victimized
many celebrated people, and Osier related fully the well-
known story of John Hunter’s attacks which ended in his
sudden death at St. George’s Hospital following a fit of
silent rage. He also cited instances in which the disease
has shown hereditary or familial tendencies. Thus :

The best-known instance is that of the Arnold family. William
Arnold, collector of customs of Cowes, died suddenly of spasm of
the heart in 1801. His son, the celebrated Thomas Arnold of Rugby,
whose case I will narrate to you shortly, died in his first attack.
Matthew Arnold, his distinguished son, was a victim of the disease
for several years, and died suddenly in an attack on Sunday, April 15,
1888, having been spared, as he hopes in his little poem called
‘ A Wish’—

. . . the whispering, crowded room,

The friends who come, and gape, and go ;

The ceremonious air of gloom —

All that makes death a hideous show !

At the time of his death, the accounts which appeared in the
Lancet and Briush Medical Journal were not clear as to the existence
of attacks of angina. The various stages in the progress of his illness

^ W. S. Thayer, ‘ Osier.’ The Natton^ N. Y., Jan. 24, 1920.

^ Published serially in the New York Medical Journal, 1896, kiv, Aug. 8th,
22nd, 29th, and Sept. 12th ; and subsequently gathered with some additions
in a volume, dedicated to W. T. Gairdner of Glasgow.

Aet. 46

Many Meetings 43 3

can be traced very well in his ^ Letters in which you will find
an account of numerous attacks from May 1885 until the time of
his death. . .

Always in great demand, such spare time as he had free
from school and hospital duties was apt to be booked up
long ahead. Early in January he wrote to J. G. Adami :

‘ I have an engagement for Friday the 24th which I could
not possibly postpone as it is an address at one of the
Philadelphia colleges,^ the invitations for which are already
out. I will speak to Mr. Gilman, though I am afraid in his
present overworked state it is unlikely that he could afford
the time.’ Naturally enough, his own engagements often
became complicated and he, too, was apt to be overworked.
On April 14th he wrote to Simon Flezner :

This is the devil’s owa luck ' The invitation to the dinner &
the Programme of the Med. Chir. Faculty came by the same mail, & I
see we have the Diabetes discussion on that evening Welch & I are
both down for remarks & I do not see that we can get out of it — much
as I should like to. We shall I suppose be able to get away by 9.30.

His active interest in the old Maryland society never
flagged, nor did he permit anything to interfere with his
regular attendance at its meetings, for this letter refers
doubtless to the annual spring session held April 28th to
May 1st, when he was elected President for the ensuing
year. As stated, the Faculty — though at the price of
a heavy mortgage — had moved to their new quarters on
Hamilton Terrace, North Eutaw Street, where an old
residence had been made over and a bookstack erected in

^ On the fly-leaf of Osier’s own copy of the lectures, published in mono-
graph form, he subsequently inserted the paragraph from. Lytton Strachey’s
‘ Eminent Victorians ’ (1918, p. 21 1) describing Dr. Arnold’s death.

^ This alludes to a talk before the classes of the Medico-Chirurgical
College {Medical Bulletin^ Phila., 1896, xviii. 81-4) in which he drew an
analogy between Addison’s disease and Myxoedema and reported a case
benefited by the use of suprarenal extract (cf. also International Medical
Magazine^ Feb. 1896). Similarly, he often gave sufficient time to the
preparation of many of his undergraduate clinics to justify their subsequent
publication. For example, his subject in one of the December clinics was
Hemiplegia in Typhoid Fever {Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, N.Y*,
May 1896), and on Jan. 13th it was on Mitral Stenosis with Ball Thrombus
in the Left Auricle, published a year later (March 1897) in the Montreal
Medical Journal

2923.1

Ff

434 Teaching: Observing: Recording May 1896

the rear, large enough to shelve, for a few years at least, its
rapidly growing collection. Nor did his attendance flag
at the Hopkins Society meetings, certain of which, par-
ticularly those of the Historical Club, would probably have
lapsed had it not been for his untiring support. Historically
minded physicians like James G. Mumford of Boston or
Robert Fletcher, the editor of the Index Medicus, were
certain to respond to his call,^ and Osier’s method was to
collect for dinner, at the club or at i West Franklin Street,
the nucleus of an audience, who somehow by tramcar were
landed ‘across town’ on the dot of 8.15. Students and
staff meanwhile had been rounded up in his amphitheatre
— an easy task, be it said, for meetings which Osier and
Welch attended brought students, whether the subject was
directly concerned with their immediate studies or not.
They knew, moreover, that these meetings would begin
at the appointed hour, for the Chief lived up to his dictum
— the primary requisite of a physician is punctuality.

On May i st the Association of Physicians, with Abraham
Jacobi as President, held its eleventh annual session. The
four events of the meeting of chief historical interest were :
the action taken protesting against the antivivisection
legislation which shortly before had been introduced in
Congress (Senate Bill, § 1552) ; the great number of
articles on diphtheria, its toxin and antitoxin ; Theobald
Smith’s paper differentiating human and bovine strains of the
bacillus of tuberculosis ; and the paper by Francis Hodder-
Williams on the X-ray in Medicine. Rontgen’s discovery
announced the year before from his laboratory in Wurzburg
was, from the outset, obviously adaptable to the diagnosis
of many surgical lesions, but Dr. Williams’s audience could
hardly have realized when listening to his brief account of
the fluoroscopic examination of an enlarged heart, of a case
of pneumonia, and of two cases of pulmonary consumption,
that the X-ray would become a diagnostic aid of such
reliability in thoracic diseases that Auenbrugger and Laennec
would soon have to make room for Rontgen on their

^ TTius, on April 13th Fletcher gave a paper on the ‘ Witches’ Pharma-
copoeia as he had done the year before on ‘ The Medical Lore of the
Older English' Dramatists ’.

Aet. 46 Meetings and More Meetings 435

pedestal. Though in the discussion of Williams’s paper
Osier asked about the possible fluoroscopy of gall-stones, not
even his imagination could foresee that the X-ray would have
an effect on medicine almost as revolutionary as the gifts of
just 100 and just 50 years before, namely, Jenner’s vaccina-
tion and Morton’s demonstration of surgical anaesthesia.

He must have gone, possibly in company with H. M.
Hurd, immediately to Atlanta, where the Academy of
Medicine, of which Hurd was President, met on May 4th.
Thatafternoon the affiliated Association of Medical Colleges,
together with the Association of State Board Examiners,
listened to ^ the introductory remarks of William Osier the
presiding officer ’ — remarks which were said to have been
^ given extemporaneously, in a charming and effective
manner ’ — completely lost, be it said, in the abstract of
the Proceedings subsequently published. This was pre-
liminary to the annual meeting of the A. M. A., when
^ Atlanta with flowing speeches of welcome and a Georgia
barbecue greeted and entertained for three days a thousand
or more physicians ’ ; and when, as is also recorded, ^ unity
prevailed on nearly all questions except the perennial one
of change of the Secretary’.^ On the 6th Osier gave the
general Address on Medicine, having chosen as his topic
^The Study of the Fevers of the South a by-product of
which had been the discovery of the ^ Alabama Student ’
already referred to. This stirring, timely, forceful address
opened as follows :

Humanity has but three great enemies : fever, famine and war ;
of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever. Gad,
the seer of David, estimated aright the relative intensity of these
afflictions when he made three days’ pestilence the equivalent of
three months’ flight before the enemy, and of three (seven) ^ years of
famine. As far back as history will carry us, in ancient Greece, in

^ At this Atlanta meeting, resolutions signed by Osier and others protesting
against the passage of Senate Bill § 1552 were introduced and passed.

^ Journal of the American Medical Association^ 1896, xxvi. 999-1004.

^ The word which Osier has bracketed perhaps needs explanation. He
took much for granted on the part of his reader, to whose hand, however,
Cruden’s Concordance may not be as conveniently near as it was to Osier’s.
There are two accounts of David’s 'great strait ’ ; in 2 Sam. xxiv. 13, the
years of famine are seven ; and in i Chron. xxi. 12, they are three.

F f 2

436 Teaching: Observing: Recording May 1896

ancieat Rome, throughout the Middle Ages, down to our own day,
the noisome pestilence, in whatsoever form it assumed, has been
dreaded justly as the greatest of evils.

From this he went on to say that one of the most conspicuous
contributions of the century had been the differentiation
of the continued fevers. He recalled the confusion that
existed in the days of Benjamin Rush, who, representing
the views of our grandparents, claimed there was but one
fever — that all were correlated — that under different con-
ditions yellow fever, malaria, typhus, and so on, could pass
into one another. After his usual tribute to the American
pupils of Louis, of whom Stille alone survived, he went on
to say that typhoid was —

... in the United States the jever^ just as it was when the old New
England physicians recognized its recurrence year after year with
the fall of the leaves. Of no disease is the history better known ;
the measures for its prevention are everywhere recognized ; the
incidence of its occurrence is an unfailing index of the sanitary
intelligence of a community. With good drainage, pure water and
pure milk, typhoid fever goes the way of typhus and cholera. The
greatest sanitary triumphs of the century have been in reducing to
a minimum the mortality from this disease in the great centres of
population in Europe. The mortality returns of Washington and
of Baltimore, and of many smaller cities demonstrate that we are
culpably negligent in allowing this most easily preventible disease
to continue its ravages. I estimate that in the latter city there were
during the year 1895 not less than 2,500 cases.

And he drew a most graphic picture of the bleedings and
cuppings and purgings and blisterings of the early days of
the century ; but even then physicians were not all addicted
to these measures, for he says : ^ If I had typhoid fever
and had a theosophic option as to a family physician I would
choose Nathan Smith, nor would I care whether it was
while he laboured in the flesh in the little town of Cornish,
N. H., in 1798, or after he had become the distinguished
Professor of Medicine in Yale.’ He proceeded in no
uncertain terms to condemn the antiseptic treatment of
typhoid, then very much in vogue, and characterized the
paper on the subject, which had recently appeared in the
society’s journal as a ‘ heterogeneous jumble unworthy the
traditions of the profession or of a subject connected in

Aet. 46 The Three Great Curses 437

this country with the names of Bartlett, Gerhard, James
Jackson and Flint Towards the end of the address there
occurs what for him was rather a gloomy prophecy — not
about pestilence nor famine, but about the third great enemy
of humanity which recent incidents had brought so near :

For one only of the three great curses the close of the century
brings no gleam of hope. It will be in another democracy, in another
century, perhaps far distant, that the race will realize the earnest
longing of the son of Amos, that ^ nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more h The gradual
growth of a deep sense of the brotherhood of man, such an abiding
sense as pervades our own profession in its relation to the suffering,
which recognizes the one blood of all the nations, may perhaps do
it. In some development of socialism, something that wiU widen
patriotism beyond the bounds of nationalism, may rest the desire
of the race in this matter ; but the evil is rooted and grounded in
the abyss of human passion, and war with all its horrors is likely long
to burden the earth.

On May 25th came the annual meeting of the Pediatric
Society in Montreal, where he read a paper ^ in which he
spoke of the lack of order or system in our classification of
diseases, particularly of the nervous system, owing to our
want of full knowledge concerning them ; and he referred
to the hopeless attempt made by ^Linnaeus, who found
botany a chaos and left it a cosmos \ to write a genera
morhorum. Osier usually gave rein to his spirits while in
Montreal, and it may be assumed that all old friends were
called upon, and that allusions may have been made to his
and E. Y. D.’s former escapades. At all events, it is related
that he played an outrageous prank on an unoffending and
gullible Boston paediatrist and his wife who, with several
other members of the society, were being entertained at
lunch by his old friend Blackader. Osier, uninvited and
unannounced, blew in towards the end of the meal, drew
up a chair beside the Boston matron, asked what she had
seen in Montreal and whether she had paid a visit to
Caughnawauga. Finding the lady devoid of humour he
was led on to describe an imaginary suburb of Montreal
across the river — built by an American army surgeon,

^ ‘ On the Classification of the Tics or Habit Movements.’ Archives of
Pediatrics, N.Y., Jan. 1897, mv. 1-5.

438 Teaching: Observing: Recording Summer 1896

E. Y. Davis — schoolhouses, parks, theatres, paved streets,
a fine hospital for children — quite a -wonderful place — but
Davis, poor fellow, had a dreadful end — drowned in the
rapids — drunk, they say. There doubtless was much more
of this, to the great amusement of the table ; but the
unsuspecting Bostonians never quite forgave him, for, as was
subsequently learned, they spent most of the afternoon in
an effort to locate Caughnawauga.

On his return to Baltimore he is found pursuing a favourite
historical subject, as the foUo-wing letter of June 2nd shows.
It indicates his flair for possible sources of rqaterial, for
having learned that Dr. Amariah Brigham, the first Superin-
tendent of the Utica State Hospital, had studied in Europe
in the days of Louis and had left a journal of the period,
he wrote to Dr. G. Alder Blumer (then of Utica) as follows ;

I am interested in the Paris medical men between ’20 and \o,
particularly in Laennec and Louis, and I am looking up at odd
intervals the history of the American students who were in Paris at
that time, particularly with Louis. I thought perhaps Brigham’s
notes might contain something of interest. I wish you would ask
his nephew. Many thanks for the copy of the Journal. We shall be
awfully sorry to lose your cousin. He is a trump, and I think has
stability enough to withstand even early success, which is such
a cruelty to so many of us.

But such pursuits were restricted to ‘ odd intervals ’
indeed, for the American Neurological Association met in
Philadelphia the next day ; and at this gathering he read
a paper on certain of the cerebral complications of Raynaud’s
disease,^ in which subject he had long been interested. And
so the spring had passed, ‘ very happy in my professional
and college work ’, as he wrote his old Barrie schoolmate,
‘ Ned ’ Milburn ; but it may be assumed that when all
this gallivanting was over, i West Franklin Street without
wife and baby proved an empty place, for they, meanwhile,
had wisely fled to New England. However, July and
August found the family reunited at The Glades Club,
where the previous summer had been so agreeably spent.

To W. S. Thayer from W. 0 . Wednesday [July, 1896].

Dear Thayer, We reached here on. Friday — after a very com-
fortable journey. I hope you have got on with the lectures. Miss H.

American Journal of the Medtcal Sciences, 1896, cxii. 522.

Aet. 47

Golfing and Bathing 439

told me that she wanted to get off for the last week of this month
8 c return for the last week of Aug. I told her to arrange it with you.
Give her all the dictation you can as she can finish any after her
return Sept. ist. I went to town [Boston] on Monday & saw several
old friends at the library Sc the Tavern Club — Prince, Bowditch,
Bullard Sc Reynolds. I have almost finished the angina lectures — ■
which have extended into seven, I suppose they will be appearing
soon. This is a fine spot, plenty of fresh air Sc the bathing is splendid.
The past few days have been rather sweltering. Mr Egerton is
flourishing — 2i lbs. . . .

So the time was passed between work and play, interspersed
with visits to his Boston friends — ^with Fitz at Beverly^ with
Bowditch in the ^ new Public Library which is a paradise
^ I am deep in golf’, he writes, ^and take headers off the
rocks twice daily.’ In another letter to Thayer on August
14th he says :

We have been sympathizing with you all in this terrible heat — it
has been a baking week here also — so still Sc moist too Sc the nights
very bad. Fortunately the baby has not felt it at all. You must
be used up. Get Smith to come up for a few days Sc ‘ mind shop ’
while you go off to Atlantic City. I too thought of Jacobs — he has
age &c. Sc would I think like the job very much Sc moreover will have
the time. He will be here in a few days Sc I will pump him as to
plans. You Sc I could arrange the details on Saturday the 6th when
I come back. I see you mention sailing on the 5th which would
be all right. I could get down on Friday. It would be very nice
to go over Sc see Jack [Hewetson] off. Better get the 3rd year
schedule made out for Oct. & Nov. They could have in the two
sections as you suggest 2 exercises weekly, independent of the regular
class which for these months I could take at 12 instead of il on
T. T. & S. We shall have to consider the other branches Sc not take
an undue amount of time. Find out if they have anything on
M. W. & F. at II. One section could go then & the other at il
T. T. Sc S. Then at 12 T. T. & S. I could talk Sc quiz for these
two months before beginning our regular Dispensary hours. I think
the quizzes should be more systematic. You arrange it as you think
best. Ultimately you will be responsible for the 3rd year teaching
I think. We must put thro the Asso. Prof, for you Sc Barker in
Sept. The matter came up in June Sc would have gone thro, all
right but the meeting was so small that it was thought wiser to defer.
Mrs Osier Sc Egerton send love to all. I hope Hurd has stood the
heat — he should get off for a good rest.

During the last week of August he was in Toronto,
possibly to see his brother Britton, who had not been well.
At all events, from his brother’s house on the 23rd he

Aet.47 The Flighty Purpose 441

return with a book of reference, so that a meal usually-
ended with volumes on the table or beside his chair.

Scraps of letters scribbled to Lafleur during these two
strenuous months show that among other things he is
getting his Angina Pectoris lectures ready for publication.
‘We are very busy just now’, he says; ‘the teaching &
wards keep us hard at work. I have recommended Thayer
as assoc. Prof. & Barker has also been recommended by
Mall. Egerton is a jewel — ^weighs 2 ^^ lbs & is a lump of
good nature.’ And, on November 4th, again -to Lafleur
about an old hospital servant :

Wednesday.

Dear L. You -will be very sorry to hear of the death of your old
friend Gus. He slipt away on Sunday while sitting peacefully in
his chair. He did not seem to have been ailing in any way. It
reaUy is a great blessing for the poor old fellow. I could not get to
the funeral today as I was detained in Phila, but I sent some flowers,
& a nice wreath or cross (I forget wh. Mrs Osier attended to it)
from you as I knew you would like it. I hear that there are hosts
of applicants for the R. V. If Miss Marion Smith of the Phila
Hosp. Training School applies say a good word for her she is a trump.

And a week later to the same : ‘ Thanks for the 10 the balance
of or all of which I will hand over to Mrs Gus for the kids
if you do not mind, & I know you wont. Egerton sends love.’

On November loth and ilth, he with Simon Flexner,
Finney, and others from the Hopkins group attended the
autumn meeting of the Maryland Faculty held in
Hagerstown, Washington County. There Osier as presiding
officer made a few sensible remarks to the effect that the
Faculty was a State organization, not a Baltimore
society ; that it was coming rapidly into the possession of
a good working library ; and that a Nurses’ Directory had
been established, both of which the practitioners through-
out the State should use. He also contributed to the pro-
gramme by giving a paper on diffuse scleroderma — a rare
condition and one which always interested him — ^whereas
Dr. Flexner, who confesses to no recollection of ever having
been at any such meeting, nevertheless must, as he admits,
‘ have |)erformed some sort of antics ’ ^ because of this

^ It was a demonstration of the recently discovered serum diagnosis
(Widal) of typhoid fever adaptable to State Boards of Health. Much of the

442 Teaching: Observing: Recording Nov.-Dee 1896

characteristic note written from i West Franklin Street,
Saturday evening, after their return :

Dear Flexner, You took the cake at the walk in Hagerstown.
The demonstration was A.i. & did much good. Your presentation
of the subject was greatly admired. Ellis & others were talking
of it on the way down. Leave in my box tomorrow a memo of the
Diener’s expenses. Yours W. O.

The researches of the senior undergraduate students by
this time were beginning to be reported at the Hopkins’
meetings. All of them had a problem of one sort or another
which usually overlapped the clinic and laboratory. Per-
haps the most notable single piece of work was that by
Opie and MacCallum upon the Malarial Infection of
Birds, reported at the meeting of November i6th,^ but
there were others almost equally so, such as C. R. Bardeen’s
studies of the effect of burns, and T. R. Brown’s dis-
covery of eosinophilia in trichinosis which must have given
particular gratification to Osier. The interest and enthu-
siasm of these bi-monthly meetings, held at the time in
a basement under one of the wards — for the hospital as
yet boasted no amphitheatre — can hardly be exaggerated.
But this new spirit was not being felt at the Hopkins alone.
One need only turn the pages of the Maryland Medical
Journal to realize what Osier during his year as President
of the Faculty managed to accomplish for the local
profession. That he succeeded in arousing the venerable
society from its lethargy, in fusing its divergent interests,
in forcing it to take a definite stand on issues relating to
public health, in elevating the standards of the profession
among the practitioners of city and state, is nothing short
of amazing. He even managed to enlist the interest of
some prominent laymen in the needs of the old society
and, accordingly, had been able at the Hagerstown meeting
to announce a gift from the Frick brothers to endow a
section of the library in memory of their brother, the late

meeting was given over to typhoid fever, which Osier persisted in bringing
to the attention of the profession and the people. Baltimore at this time
rejoiced in a ‘ new ’ State Board of Health, which had a $5,ooo-budget '
when it needed half a milhon.

^ Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, Mar. 1897, 5^-

Aet. 47 Bread upon the Waters 443

Dr. Charles Frick. It was a paltry sum of $1,000, to be
sure, but it was a beginning, and Osier determined to make
the very most of it as an example to others. Thus, on
November 26th he wrote again to his friend Chadwick of
Boston :

You cast your bread upon our waters & we are finding it daily.
The impetus which your talk gave the old Faculty has done great
good. The Fricks have fitted up a very nice room & have given us
a good sum to buy new books. We shall have an opening of this
new Frick Library on Dec. loth. Could you be present with us.
Chew [Samuel C.] wiU speak of the late Dr. Frick & one of his old
friends Reverdy Johnson will also make a brief address.

Chadwick must have thought he had done enough for the
Maryland profession by his address the year before ; but,
undeterred. Osier finally secured as speakers J. M. Da Costa,
then President of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia,
and Joseph A. Bryant, who similarly represented the New
York Academy of Medicine. The meeting forms a land-
mark in the history of the institution, and the several
committee reports made at the time show what a period
of rejuvenation was being entered upon. After the speeches
there were many reports — of the Book and Journal Club and
the funds it had raised ; of the enthusiastic young Librarian
who had recently been appointed ; of the new Nurses’
Directory; of the Committee on General Sanitation
organized to promote the cause of hygiene in Maryland
by quickening an enlightened public interest in sanitation ;
of the committee appointed to secure a pure milk supply
for Baltimore, and so on. How much of all this was due
to Osier, who kept himself completely in the background,
can be gathered from this letter from one of the older
Baltimore physicians, sent the next day :

To W. O.fiom James Caiey Thomas. 1822 Madison Avenue,

nth December, 1896.

Dear Dr. Osier, — I feel that I must tell you how beautifully you
obliterated yourself in the exercises of last evening. Every thing
we saw & heard was due to you — ^your influence & personal effort' —
— & yet nobody was permitted to say so. May I be allowed to take
this quiet method of throwing up my hat & shouting. Osier ! Osier !
long live Osier ! ! ! Yours truly,

J. W. Carey Thomas.

CHAPTER XVII
1897-8

LETTERS, SCIENCE, AND PRACTICE

Litterae : SciENTiA : Praxis. This was the legend in-
scribed under the panel of Linacre, Harvey, and Sydenham,
his chief medical heroes, which by now had come from
Acland to adorn his library mantel.^ There was something
of each of them in his own composition, and a future panel
could well include Osier himself, with the addition of
Doctrina in its legend. Whatever was interesting or novel
in the cases brought to him, he was quick to observe, to
investigate, to write about, to teach over. His carefully
prepared clinics were often on subjects suggested by cases
he had seen in consultation, and though he did not teach
from his preparatory notes they often found their way into
print. This was true, for example, of a clinical lecture
given January 22nd on ‘ The BaU-valve Gall-stone in the
Common Duct ’ ^ — a subject on which he had evidently
been cogitating during the previous summer. It was one
of his more important and original contributions — impor-
tant both to physician and surgeon — and the combination
of symptoms of intermittent jaundice with paroxysmal
chills and fever, so often at the time mistaken for malaria
but usually due to a single gall-stone imprisoned above the
orifice of the duct, deserves being known as Osier’s syndrome.

In a letter of February 4th to J. G. Adami, mentioning
plans to entertain some British scientists expected in the
autumn, he exclaims, ‘ What a year of meetings ! We shall
be used up with them. Foster writes that he is coming to
Toronto — to Montreal too, I hope. They have asked me
to give the address in medicine, deuced good of them !

^ He had ordered a duplicate set, which was presented to the William
Pepper Laboratory recently opened at the University Hospital in Philadel-
phia. Pepper must have written regarding them, for on Jan. 13th Osier
replied : ‘ Drummond has sent me word with reference to the pictures.
The Linacre was copied from the picture by Holbein ; Sydenham from the
one by Sir Peter Lely; Harvey from the painting by Cornelius Jansen
[Janssen] in the College of Physicians.’

Published in the Lancet, Lond., May 15, 1897, i. 1319-23.

Aet. 47 Biscuits, Chccse, and Beer 445

I shall be delighted. The prospects are A.i and we shall
get many of the very best men.’ Even thus early in the year
it was evident that there was to be a surfeit of medical
meetings, national and international. In many of them he
participated from the same sense of duty which took him to
the local societies of hospital, city, and state. Then too,
appeals that he appear at such functions as the commence-
ment exercises of the Training School for Nurses at the old
Blockley Hospital, where he gave an address this same month,
he found irresistible and if there were groans he concealed
them well. He did not compose without effort, as the
fragments of writing leading up to the successive drafts of
his addresses bear testimony.

He had by this time come to give over his Saturday
evenings to his fourth-year group of clinical clerks — a custom
he continued throughout his entire Baltimore period. He
had a definite routine for these evenings. Two students
were invited in turn for dinner at 7 p.m. ; the rest of the
group came at 8 p.m., and gathered around the dining-room
table. An hour was passed in a discussion of the week’s
work, each student being asked about his patients and his
reading. Then over biscuits, cheese, and beer he would
give an affectionate discourse on one or two favourite
authors — perhaps Sydenham this week, Fuller or Milton
the next — illustrated by early editions of their works. This
was the Osier his pupils of Baltimore days best remember,
and naturally at these informal gatherings he came to know
them individually with a degree of intimacy unusual in
these later days for one in his position.^ In these surround-
ings he was at his best.

A few only of the formal meetings with which the year

^ Dr. J F. Mitchell, one of the fourth-year students in this spring of 1897,
with a small camera took a photograph of the house staff, for which he had
captured three of the chiefs (Halsted, Osier, and Kelly) who were posed in
the centre of the picture. Dr. Mitchell subsequently had a separate enlarge-
ment made of these three figures, and one day, carrjdng a print of this, he
encountered Osier in the hospital corridor. ‘The Chief’ scanned the
picture a moment and promptly added an appropriate legend, saying : ‘ The
obstetrician holds the distaff ; the physician spins the thread ; the surgeon
cuts It off.’ Under another copy he wrote ‘Godliness — Sobriety —
Respectability ’.

446 Letters: Science: Practice Feb. 1897

was punctuated need be mentioned. Under the auspices
of the Maryland ‘ Faculty ’ a conference of health officers
from various parts of the state was held on February
I7th-i8th, for which John S. Fulton was in part responsible,
though Osier was the prime mover. He had prevailed upon
the Governor as well as his neighbour Cardinal Gibbons to
attend ; whereas the Attorney-General, Mr. Bonaparte,
D. C. Gilman, and others had agreed to preside at the
different sessions, thereby calling public attention to the
meeting and its purposes. For though a bacteriologist,
trained in Welch’s laboratory, had finally been appointed
to the local Health Board, it was still a dormant body and
sorely needed the awakening which could only come from
an enlightened public opinion. In the address of welcome
Osier emphasized the five things on which the public needed
guidance : a reorganized Board of Health, remodelled
lunacy laws, proper milk inspection, proper control of
water supplies, and a hospital for infectious diseases. One
full session of the conference was given over to vital statistics,
another to diphtheria, and a third on the last evening to
typhoid fever, to which he contributed a brief paper ^
reiterating, in new and telling phrases, the difficulties of
distinguishing in many cases without proper laboratory
methods between typhoid, malaria, meningitis, and even
pneumonia. ‘ Is there a typho-malarial fever ? Yes, in the
brains of the doctors, but not in the bodies of the patients.’
And he went on to say that hereafter the Board of Health
should return his blank to every physician who sent in such
a diagnosis, asking for something better.

As an outcome of all this, the Maryland Public Health
Association, with Dr. Fulton as its Secretary, was organized
for the purpose of calling attention to sanitary measures
throughout the state and thereby forcing reforms upon
a timid and reluctant legislature. Mr. Gilman’s subsequent
comment upon the conference was that it was the most
hopeful sign of progress seen in Maryland in twenty years.
Nor was Osier’s voice raised in the public-health campaign
solely in the city of his adoption. A few days later (Feb. 22 nd)

^ ‘ Tke Disguises of Typhoid Fever.’ Maryland Medical Journal, 1897,
xxxvi, 423.

Aet. 47 ‘ Boostirig ’ the Faculty 447

in an address ^ before the Medical Society of the County
of New York, he made an appeal for more accurate studies
of malaria. ^ North of Mason & Dixon’s line [he said]
physicians are prone to diagnose malaria for other diseases ;
south of the line they are more prone to diagnose other
diseases for malaria ; in both regions it is a source of
greater errors in vital statistics than any other affection.’

In turn came the annual meeting of the state society, held
on April 27th, when he discussed ^ The Functions of a State
F acuity ’, in his presidential address. The old society, nearing
its centennial anniversary, shared, as he pointed out, the
designation ^ Faculty ’ — now used for a group of teachers
rather than of practitioners — with but one other similar
body, namely the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of
Glasgow. He emphasized that the society by its act of
incorporation had a dual function — that of a licensing body,
now given up, and a means whereby the advances in medical
knowledge could be disseminated throughout the State of
Maryland. The chief weakness of the profession he said
lies in its tendency to break ^ into cliques and coteries, the
interests of which take precedence over others of wider and
more public character ’ ; from this a baneful individualism
is likely to arise, with every man for himself — ^ a centri-
fugalizing influence against which this Faculty is and has
been the only enduring protest ’. And with expressions
reminiscent of those he had used in his Montreal days
in regard to the importance of medical meetings, he
said :

No class of men needs friction so much as physicians ; no class
gets less. The daily round of a busy practitioner tends to develop
an egoism of a most intense kind, to which there is no antidote.
The few setbacks are forgotten, the mistakes are often buried, and
ten years of successful work tend to make a man touchy, dogmatic,
intolerant of correction, and abominably self-centred. To this
mental attitude the medical society is the best corrective, and a man
misses a good part of his education who does not get knocked about
a bit by his colleagues in discussions and criticisms. . . .

Then in regard to the educational function of the Faculty’s

^ ^ The Diagnosis of Malarial Fever.’ Medical News^ N.Y., Mar. 6, 1897,
Ixx. 289-92.

Letters : Science : Practice

448

May 1897

library, to which he had already given and continued to give
so much time and labour, he said :

Books are tools, doctors are craftsmen, and so truly as one can
measure the development of any particular handicraft by the variety
and complexity of its tools, so we have no better means of judging
the intelligence of a profession than by its general collection of books.
A physician who does not use books and journals, who does not need
a library, who does not read one or two of the best weeklies and
monthlies, soon sinks to the level of the cross-counter prescriber,
and not alone in practice, but in those mercenary feelings and habits
which characterize a trade. . . .

During the first week in May, the fourth of the triennial
Congresses of the Special Societies was held in Washington,
under the presidency of William H. Welch, who gave at
the time his notable address on ‘ Adaptation in Pathological
Processes ’. One of the general meetings which brought
all the societies together was given over to the subject of the
Internal Secretions, and W. H. Howell, R. H. Chittenden,
J. George Adami, James J. Putnam, Francis P. Kinnicutt,
and Osier were the participants.^ That such a session as
this should have been held is interesting historically, in
that it marks the beginning of the extraordinary period of
professional interest in the ductless glands, an interest
which has grown to such proportions — indeed to such
disproportions — as to have a dominating influence, under
the comprehensive name of ‘ endocrinology ’, on many of the
present-day conceptions not only of certain obscure diseases
but of human types presumably normal both physically and
mentally.

For his part in this symposium Osier reverted once more
to the subject of Sporadic Cretinism in America, with
which he had formerly dealt in 1893 when he was cognizant
of only eleven cases. But he was now able to present

^ At the Congress, Osier appears to have spent most of his time with the
physicians, before whom he read on ‘ The Hepatic Complications of Typhoid
Fever emphasizing the relation of gall-stones to typhoid infections, a
subject just then exciting great interest. He also gave a paper before the
paediatrists on ‘ Adherent Pericardium in Children ’ ; but as this does not
appear in the Transactions he probably had been so swamped by the elaborate
study of Cretinism that he failed to finish it for publication.

Aet. 47 The Pariah of Nature 449

abstracts of sixty examples of this extraordinary malady, of
which he painted this graphic picture :

No type of human transformation is more distressing to look at
than an aggravated case of cretinism. It recalls Milton’s description
of the Shape at the Gates :

If shape it might be called, that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint or limb,

or those hideous transformations of the fairy prince into some
frightful monster. The stunted stature, the semi-bestial aspect,
the blubber lips, retrousse nose sunken at the root, the wide-open
mouth, the lolling tongue, the small eyes, half closed with swollen
lids ; the stolid expressionless face, the squat figure, the muddy, dry
skin, combine to make the picture of what has been well termed
‘ the pariah of nature ’. Not the magic wand of Prospero or the
brave kiss of the daughter of Hippocrates ever affected such a change
as that which we are now enabled to make in these unfortunate
victims, doomed heretofore to live in hopeless imbecility, an un-
speakable affliction to their parents and to their relatives, . . .

And at the conclusion, before showing his lantern slides
he said :

That I am able to show you such marvellous transformations,
such undreamt-of transfigurations, is a direct triumph of vivisection,
and no friend of animals who looks at the ^ counterfeit presentments ’
I here demonstrate will consider the knowledge dearly bought,
though at the sacrifice of hundreds of dogs and rabbits.

He had good reasons for the insertion of this timely
statement. For the antivivisection bill under Senator
Gallinger’s control, which had been before the United
States Senate for more than a year, had for a second time
been reported favourably out of Committee. Dr. Samuel C.
Busey and Surgeon-General Sternberg had expressed the
opinion before the business meeting of the Congress that
those residing in the District of Columbia were powerless
to combat the existing trend of opinion in the Senate, and
that pressure would have to be brought to bear by the
voting population in other parts of the country.^ It was

^ Public opinion had for years been largely fed by Mr. Mitchell, the
Editor of Life, who for some unaccountable reason made the doctors the
chief target of his wit and satire. Some of this was amusing, some of it
deserved, and all of it could be endured by a profession which had survived
Moliere. But it was a different matter when, as champion of the ami-

2923 i G g

Letters : Science : Practice

450

May 1897

left with Welch, the President of the Congress, to appoint
a committee to act on this proposal, and he did the unusual
thing of putting himself on the committee and subsequently
of assuming the chief burden of its activities. In view of
Osier’s testimony two years later the story touches him
sufficiently to justify a statement here of the essential facts.

Propaganda on the part of those opposed to medical
research had been indulged in more or less continuously
since the ’6o’s, and frequent biUs opposed to the use of
animals for experimentation had been introduced into
various state legislatures — always without success. As the
result of these agitations, resolutions protesting against
any legislative interference -with experimental research had
from time to time been passed by various of the leading
medical and scientific societies. But a more serious attack
than any before had been made early in 1896, when what was
known as Senate Bill § 1552 was introduced in Congress by
Senator Gallinger under the misleading title of ‘ A Bill
for the Further Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the
District of Columbia ’. The real significance of the bill,
which had been fostered by a group of antivivisectionists
of the District, had been unsuccessfully camouflaged by its
innocent-sounding title, and because of protests a hearing
was called. The hearing, however, was a hurried one ; the
natural opponents of the measure, like the Surgeon-General,
were given scant notice ; the bill, slightly modified, was
presented out of Committee to the Senate,’ and might have
passed but for the outcry on the part of most of the medical
and scientific societies, as well as educational institutions of
the country.^

We knew nothing [writes Professor Welch] about the first Gallinger
bill until it had been reported favourably, and unanimously so, by
the Committee on the District of Columbia, and it would un-
vivisection controversy, he saw fit in outrageous cartoons to hold up physiolo-
gists like Osier’s friends Bowditch and H, C. Wood to public abuse and
misrepresentation. In an open letter of Oct. 21, 1895, describing these
attacks as^ ‘ venomous and malicious Osier repudiated Li/k and withdrew his
subscription. To this Mr. Mitchell replied in an unwise editorial over which
a curtain may be drawn now that L'^e has atoned for its unfortunate anti-
vivisection attitude of the past.

^ Cf Senate Document § 31, 54,* Congress, second session, 1896.

Aet.47 Antivivisection Bills 451

doubtedly have passed if we had not bestirred ourselves. It was
then that Osier and I spent an entire evening in his house in Wash-
ington with Senator GormaUj who promised to have himself placed
on the Committee and to keep the bill in Committee. He said we
would have to prepare a speech for him, if the bill got before the
Senate. It never did. . , . The next session, a somewhat amended
bill was introduced and it was then that I gave so much time — the
better part of a winter — to organizing the profession in each State
in opposition. I was then President of the Congress of Physicians
and Surgeons, and acted more or less officially in that capacity.
I think this was as critical a time for animal experimentation as had
occurred in this country.

The second bill, to which this letter refers, known as Senate
Bill § 1063,^ was little more than the original bill with slight
changes in form but not in purpose. Promises of votes
sufficient to secure its defeat were obtained through the
family physicians or influential constituents of a number
of Senators, and President Cleveland, indeed, promised to
veto it if it ever reached him. A third and last attempt by
Senator Gallinger to get action upon this ill-considered
legislation was made two years later, as will be seen.

The Washington Congress was the first in order of a
succession of spring meetings, some of which Osier attended,
and to others he sent his assistants. Moreover, two im-
portant British associations were to meet in Canada in the
autumn, as he indicates in this note :

T 0 Edward A, Schafer from W. 0 . i West Franklin Street,

May 14.

The 2nd edition of the Histology which I have received this week
was welcomed as an old friend. I have looked it over with great
interest, not too without regrets since I now have travelled so far
from my first love. Appletons will send you in a week or ten days
a little volume of Lectures on Angina Pectoris — a disease which
has interested me deeply for several years. I wish that we could

^ Cf. ^ Objections to the Antivivisection Bill now Before the Senate *.
William H. Welch. Journal of the American Medical Association^ Feb. 5, 1898.
It is related in the Introduction to vol. v of Allbutt’s ‘ System of Medicine ’
[1898] that the volume had been delayed because one of the chief contributors
[Welch] had been unable to prepare his chapter for the reason that he had
been spending six months in a campaign against an American antivivisection
bill, the more difficult to defeat because the passage of a similar bill in England
some years before had been permitted.

Gg2

4^2 Letters: Science: Practice june-july 1897

visit England this year but I must be in Toronto at the Meeting
of the B.A.A.S. and then at Montreal for the B.M.A.^ I was sorry
to hear that you cannot come out, but I suppose it is impossible.
You have to be now both father and mother to the children.
Mrs. Schafer and Jack’s photos in the little case she gave me, are on
the mantehpiece.

I have just had a tempting offer from New York — the Dept of
Medicine in the United Schools — University & Bellevue — at
^2,000 salary, with of course splendid prospects for consultation
work. I have however such exceptional facilities here and we are
so comfortable that I have declined. My small boy, now 16 mos.
is a very fine specimen.

The nurses’ graduation exercises at the Hopkins came on
the 3rd of June, and Osier read the address on Nurse
and Patient which did not entirely please those mem-
bers of the nursing profession who took themselves too
seriously. Any one knowing Osier’s peculiarities on the
few occasions when he was sufficiently ill to have a trained
nurse forced upon him, can but smile at re-reading these
lines :

The trained nurse as a factor in life may be regarded from many
points of view — philanthropic, social, personal, professional and
domestic. To her virtues we have been exceeding kind — tongues
have dropped manna in their description. To her faults — ^well,
let us be blind, since this is neither the place nor the time to expose
them. I would rather call your attention to a few problems con-
nected with her of interest to us collectively — and individually too,
since who can tell the day of her coming.

Is she an added blessing or an added horror in our beginning
civilization ? Speaking from the point of view of a sick man, I take
my stand firmly on the latter view, for several reasons. No man
with any self-respect cares to be taken off guard, in mufti, so to
speak. Sickness dims the eye, pales the cheek, roughens the chin,
and makes a man a scarecrow, not fit to be seen by his wife, to say
nothing of a stranger all in white or blue or gray. Moreover she will
take such unwarrantable liberties with a fellow, particularly if she
catches him with fever : then her special virtues could be depicted
by King Lemuel alone. So far as she is concerned you are again in
swathing bands, and in her hands you are, as of yore, a helpless lump
of human clay. She will stop at nothing, and between baths and
spongings and feeding and temperature-taking you are ready to cry
with Job the cry of every sick man — ‘ Cease then^ and let me alone.’

^ Reprinted as No. IX in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses

Aet.47 The Nurse as a Factor in Life 453

For generations has not this been his immemorial privilege, a privilege
with vested rights as a deep-seated animal instinct — to turn his
face towards the wall, to sicken in peace, and, if he so wishes,
to die undisturbed ? All this the trained nurse has, alas ! made
impossible.

Certain.17 there was little dropping of manna or giving
out of bouquets in this address, as unlike the perfunctory
one usually given on such occasions as could well be, filled
as it is with warnings and counsels to those who have come
to take their place beside the physician and priest. And he
ended by cautioning trained nurses against the benumbing
influence of institutional life which, for many, dulls the
fine edge of sympathy ; and advised ‘ the practice towards
patients of the Golden Rule as announced by Confucius :
“ What you do not like when done to yourself, do not
do to others,” so familiar to us in its positive form as the
great Christian counsel of perfection, in which alone are
embraced both the law and the prophets.’

Two weeks later, on June 15th, came the commencement
exercises of the first graduating class from the medical
school, fifteen in all, the majority of whom were to remain
another year as house officers or as assistants in one or another
of the laboratories. A group of these students had organized
what was known as ‘ The Pithotomy Club ’, a term which
indicates the making of a hole in a keg, and there had been
festive occasions with song and refreshments in which
students and teachers had participated, and in which the
foibles of the teachers in particular were not spared in
burlesque. Those were indeed informal days at the
Hopkins.

With his first assistant away — for Thayer had gone to
Moscow to attend the Xllth International Medical Con-
gress that summer — and with some addresses to write for
meetings to come in the autumn, he appears to have stayed
on in Baltimore for a part of July, while Mrs. Osier, with
Revere and the boy’s coloured ‘ Mammy ’, visited her
friends in Wilkesbarre. He subsequently joined them at
his brother’s house in Toronto ; but it was a torrid summer,
the boy was teething, and they proceeded to Montreal,
whence Sir William van Horn sent them on comfortably in

Letters : Science : Practice

454

July 1897

his private car to St. Andrews, New Brunswick, where they
had made arrangements for a cottage.

During this month of July, with the aid of a medical
dictionary, a copy of Osler^s Text-book was being read word
for word iDy a layman passing his summer in the Catskill
Highlands — an event of far greater importance to medicine
and of greater biographical importance than the mere
happenings of Osler^s own summer vacation in New Bruns-
wick. This gentleman happened to be the member of
John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropic staff who was successful
in directing his interests towards medical research, and as
Osier’s volume was an essential link in this process, the story
deserves telling here in his own words, though five years
elapsed before Osier knew of the incident.

In the early summer of 1897 my interest in medicine was awakened
by a , , . Minneapolis boy who in his loneliness in New York used
often to spend his week-ends with us in Montclair. His deceased
father had been a homeopathic physician but he himself was studying
in the regular school. I determined as a result of my talks with this
enthusiastic young student to make myself more intelligent on the
whole subject of medicine, and at his suggestion I bought a copy
of Dr. Osier’s ‘ Principles and Practice of Medicine . I read the
whole book without skipping any of it. I speak of this not to com-
memorate my industry or intelligence but to testify to Osier’s
charm, for it is one of the very few scientific books that are possessed
of high literary quality. There was a fascination about the style
itself that led me on, and having once started I found a hook in my
nose that pulled me from page to page, and chapter to chapter, until
the whole of about a thousand large and closely printed pages
brought me to the end.

But there were other things besides its style that attracted and

intensified my interest To the layman student, like me, demanding

cures, and specifics, he had no word of comfort whatever. In fact,
I saw clearly from the work of this thoroughly enlightened, able and
honest man, perhaps the foremost practitioner in the world, that
medicine had — ^with the few exceptions above mentioned — no cures,
and that about all that medicine up to 1897 could do was to suggest
some measure of relief, how to nurse the sick, and to alleviate in
some degree the suffering. Beyond this, medicine as a cure had not
progressed. I found further that a large number of the most common
diseases, especially of the young and middle-aged, were infectious or
contagious, caused by infinitesimal germs that are breathed in with
the atmosphere, or are imparted by contact or are taken in with the
food or drink or communicated by the incision of insects in the skin.

Aet. 48 An Opportunity for Mr. Rockefeller 455

I learned that of these germs, only a very few had been identified
and isolated. I made a list — and it was a very long one at that
time, much longer than it is now — of the germs which we might
reasonably hope to discover but which as yet had never been, with
certainty, identified ; and I made a longer list of the infectious or
contagious diseases for which there had been as yet no cure at all
discovered.

When I laid down this book I had begun to realize how woefully
neglected in all civilized countries and peihaps most of all in this
country, had been the scientific study of medicine. ... It became
clear to me that medicine could hardly hope to become a science
until it should be endowed, and qualified men could give themselves
to uninterrupted study and investigation, on ample salary, entirely
independent of practice. . . . Here was an opportunity for Mr. Rocke-
feller to become a pioneer. This idea took possession of me.
The more I thought of it the more interested I became. I knew
nothing of the cost of research ; I did not realize its enormous
difficulty ; the only thing I saw was the overwhelming and universal
need and the infinite promise, world-wide, universal, eternal. Filled
with these thoughts and enthusiasms, I returned from my vacation
on July 24th. I brought my Osier into the office at No. 26 Broadway,
and there I dictated for Mr. Rockefeller’s eye a memorandum in
which I aimed to show to him the actual condition of medicine in
the United States and the world as disclosed by Dr. Osier’s book.
I enumerated the infectious diseases and pointed out how few of
the germs had yet been discovered and how great the field of dis-
covery ; how few specifics had yet been found and how appalling
was the unremedied suffering, I pointed to the Koch Institute in
Paris. I pointed out the fact, first stated by Huxley I think, that
the results in dollars or francs of Pasteur’s discoveries about anthrax
and on the diseases of fermentation and of the silkworm had saved
for the French nation a sum far in excess of the entire cost of the
Franco-German War. I remember insisting in this or some subse-
quent memoranda that even if the proposed institute should fail to
discover anything, the mere fact that he, Mr. Rockefeller, had
established such an institute of research, if he were to consent to
do so, would result in other institutes of a similar kind, or at least
other funds for research being established, until research in this
country would be conducted on a great scale ; and that out of the
multitudes of workers we might be sure in the end of abundant
rewards, even though those rewards did not come directly from the
institute which he might found.

These considerations took root in the mind of Mr. Rockefeller and,
later, of his son. Eminent physicians were consulted as to the
feasibility of the project, a competent agent was employed to secure
the counsel of specialists on research, and out of wide consultation

456 Letters: Science: Practice Aug.-Sept. 1897

the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research came into being.
It had its origin in Dr. Osier’s perfectly frank disclosure of the
very narrow limitations of ascertained truth in medicine as it existed
in 1897.^

All unconscious of what was taking place at No. 26
Broadway, Osier from St. Andrews was sending scraps of
letters to various people to the effect that he had invited
Richet to stay with him ; that he had arranged for Bowditch
and the Fosters ; that his nephew would not be back, so
another small room would be free ; that he would reach
Toronto ‘ Tuesday eve ’ which presumably was August
the 17th. All this was in preparation for the British Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science, which after a thirteen-
year interval met for a second time in Canada this hot
summer. Mrs. Osier, possibly mindful of a B.M.A. meeting
in Nottingham a few years before, preferred to go with
the baby to her mother in Canton, while her gregarious
husband, indifferent to crowds and heat, entertained a
houseful of guests in his brother Britton’s abode in Toronto.
The meeting (August 1 8 th-2 1 st) was memorable for one thing
at least, and this was registered in terms of the thermometer
so high that frock-coated Englishmen with top hats were
reduced to mopping their brows and appearing in the
streets in their shirt-sleeves. There were many notable
guests and many old friends ; but of all. Lister, just elevated
to the peerage, President of the Royal Society, President
also of the Association, was the outstanding figure, and
Osier must have been gratified to have him pay special
attention to an exhibit in Ramsay Wright’s lecture-room
by one of the newly fledged Hopkins graduates, W. G.
MacCallum, of a discovery he had made while studying
the malarial parasite of crows.

There followed a week’s intermission before the Montreal
meeting, which gave the foreign guests an opportunity to
enjoy the beauties of Upper Canada, though probably
none of them made a pilgrimage to Weston or Bond Head,
for by now the forests had retreated well north of the
Muskoka Lakes, where Lister apparently was taken. Osier

^ From unpublished archives which deal with the early history of the
.Rockefeller Institute, through the kindness of Mr F. T. Gates.

Aet. 48 Lister the Outstanding Figure 457

meanwhile had rejoined his family, and from Canton on
August 28th wrote to his absent assistant :

Dear Thayer, I hope you have had a jolly Sc profitable time.
We saw in the cable dispatches that you had been presented to the
Czar at Peterhof. I write to catch you in London. Draw on me
the National Union Bank of Baltimore for the $200. I have arranged
it. You will need it I am sure. Everything seems smooth at the
J. H. H. Camac is engaged & leaves in Oct. This will put McCrae
in his place — lucky w^e have so good a man. MacCallum has a great
find in the crows blood — conjugation of organisms — the flagella
definitely penetrating certain bodies which undergo changes &c.
It seems quite straight & will of course be most important. His
paper was very well received. Lister moved the vote of thanks Sc
spoke most appreciatively of the work. We have been at St. Andrews,
delightful spot, I go to Montreal for the meeting & then on the
4th to Baltimore. Mrs Osier & Ike are very well & send love. . . ,

Apparently he left the same evening for Montreal, for
on the following day, Saturday, he sent word to Adami
regarding the houseful of friends being gathered at the
home of his former colleague, Gardner :

I have not made any arrangement for Welch. Gardner offered
me four rooms which I have filled with J. C. Wilson, F. C. Shattuck,
Fitz and Musser. I shall also be there. G. may be able to give
another room. He is asking Chadwick and one or two others I believe.
G. will be here next w^eek, and I can arrange it if you have not seen
him meanwhile.

It was the first time in its sixty-four years of existence
that the British Medical Association had ventured to hold
one of its meetings overseas, but, taken in combination with
the meeting in Toronto of the science association of which
Lister was President, a large attendance from Great Britain
was guaranteed. T. G. Roddick, Professor of Surgery at
McGill, one of the dinner-club members of Osier’s Montreal
days, was President of the ^ B.M.A. but Lister of course
figured largely in the proceedings, and the old Medico-
Chirurgical Society gave a special dinner in his honour.
Also, from beginning to end, another old friend, the
Chancellor of the University, Lord Strathcona and Mount
Royal — he who had been Sir Donald Smith a few days
before — ^lent his presence to the more important general
sessions. At one of these, on Wednesday, September ist,

458 Letters: Science: Practice Sept, 1897

came Osier’s address, a feature of the week’s ceremonies,
in which, speaking more as a Canadian than an American,
he dwelt on ^ certain of the factors which have moulded
the profession in English-speaking lands beyond the narrow
seas* — of British Medicine in Greater Britain ’d

Evolution [he said] advances by such slow and imperceptible
degrees that to those who are part of it the finger of time scarcely
seems to move. Even the great epochs are seldom apparent to the
participators. During the last century neither the colonists nor
the mother country appreciated the thrilling interest of the long-
fought duel for the possession of this continent. The acts and
scenes of the drama, to them detached, isolated and independent,
now glide like dissolving views into each other, and in the vitascope
of history we can see the true sequence of events. That we can
meet here to-day, Britons on British soil, in a French province, is one
of the far-ofi results of that struggle. This was but a prelude to
the other great event of the eighteenth century : the revolt of the
colonies and the founding of a second great English-speaking nation —
m the words of Bishop Berkeley’s prophecy, ‘ Time’s noblest off-
spring Surely a unique spectacle, that a century later descendants
of the actors of these two great dramas should meet in an English
city in New France ! Here the American may forget Yorktown in
Louisbourg, the Englishman Bunker Hill in Quebec, and the French-
man both Louisbourg and Quebec in Chateauguay ; while we
Canadians — English and French — in a forgiving spirit, overlooking
your unseemly quarrels, are only too happy to welcome you to our
country — this land on which and for which you have so often fought.

When and where the writing was done, far less the
collateral reading,^ is not apparent, but in all probability
it followed the receipt of Acland’s panel, for after drawing
a comparison between Hellas and her colonies and England
and hers, the address was largely woven about Linacre, the
type of literary physician to whom was largely due the
revival of Greek learning in England in the sixteenth
century ; Harvey, practitioner and hospital physician, as
well as experimental scientist ; and Sydenham, the model
of the practical physician of modern times.

^ Reprinted as No X in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses 1904.

^ He had been reading things as unrelated as ‘ The Life of Thonaas
Wakley’, Hooker’s ‘Ecclesiastical Polity’, Hawthorne’s ‘Scarlet Letter’,
Parkman’s ‘ Jesuits in North America ’, ‘ The History of Aryan Medical
Science ’, ‘ In the Days of the Canada Company ’, and the ‘ Breakfast Table ’
senes.

Aet.48 Pasture is not Everything 459

A Physician [he went on to say] may possess the science of Harvey
and the art of Sydenham, and yet there may be lacking in him
these finer qualities of heart and head which count for so much in
life. Pasture is not everything, and that indefinable though well-
understood something which we know as breeding is not always an
accompaniment of great professional skill. Medicine is seen at its
best in men whose faculties have had the highest and most har-
monious culture. The Lathams, the Watsons, the Pagets, the
Jenners, and the Gairdners have influenced the profession less by
their special work than by exemplifying those graces of life and
refinements of heart which make up character. And the men of this
stamp in Greater Britain have left the most enduring mark, —
Beaumont, Bovell and Hodder in Toronto ; Holmes, Campbell and
Howard in this city ; the Warrens, the Jacksons, the Bigelows, the
Bowditches and the Shattucks in Boston ; Bard, Hosack, Francis,
Clark and Flint of New York ; Morgan, Shippen, Redman, Rush,
Coxe, the elder Wood, the elder Pepper, and the elder Mitchell of
Philadelphia — Brahmins all, in the language of the greatest Brahmin
among them, Oliver Wendell Holmes — these and men like unto
them have been the leaven which has raised our profession above the
dead level of a business.

Nor did he forget to mention Father Johnson in connexion
with a lament that medicine had become severed from the
old-fashioned natural history. And there was much more
of equal and greater interest, as he traced with a sure
historical perspective the development, and portrayed the
conditions of the profession in America and the British
colonies. September 4th, according to his programme,
found him back in Baltimore, and though he had pledged
himself for another formal address which must be written,
nevertheless he appeared ten days later in Ocean City for
the autumn meeting of the Maryland ‘ Faculty where he
read a paper on haemorrhage in typhoid fever. A day later
he left for Boston, as told in the following note written from
the Maryland Club on the i6th to Palmer Howard’s younger
son, who was just entering McGill :

Dear Campbell, Just a line to wish you good luck and God-speed
in your Medical work. The hopes of aU your father’s dear friends
are set on you. I know you will work steadily and surely. Let me
know of any of your troubles and worries. I should like to stand
to you in the same relation your father did to me. I can never
repay what he did in the way of example and encouragement.
Aunt Grace is not yet back. I am going to Boston tonight to see her.

460 Letters; Science; Practice Autumn 1897

As a result of this visit, Laving been called to see a patient
in Nahant, he was exposed while driving across the Nahant
Neck and came down with one of his periodical bronchial
attacks which, occasionally verging on pneumonia, subse-
quently came to cause his friends so much anxiety and of
which ere long he began to make some personal observations,
jotted down in his account-book.

There were two topics, it may be noted, on which he
particularly dwelt year after year in his fourth-year instruc-
tion — pneumonia and typhoid — for he felt that if these
two diseases, one primarily thoracic and the other primarily
abdominal, were thoroughly understood by the students,
it would give them a satisfactory foundation on which
to build their later experience. Accordingly, during the
autumn and winter semesters every case entering the
hospital was listed under the patient’s name on the ample
blackboard in his clinical amphitheatre, and the subsequent
complications and ultimate issue of the disease were added,
so that the students came to know these cases almost -as
intimately as if they had been private patients of their own.
The exercises in connexion with these topics, as the course
progressed, led Osier frequently into print : as, for example,
in his paper ‘ On Certain Features in the Prognosis of
Pneumonia ’, published early in this year, where he analysed
the mortality of the first 124 cases of pneumonia which
had been admitted to or had developed in the hospital.
He said : ‘No other disease kills from one-fourth to one-
third of all persons attacked ’ ; and ‘ so fatal is it, that to die
of pneumonia in this country is said to be the natural end
of elderly people ’ .

I West Franklin Street saw a succession of guests during
the early weeks of the autumn term, members of the
B. M. A. or B. A. A. S. who had drifted down after the
Toronto and Montreal meetings. ‘ I do wish you would
come on here and stay a couple of weeks ’, he would write.

‘ You can breakfast at 10, play with Ikey till 12, spend
a couple of hours in the laboratory with Futcher & amuse
yourself the rest of the day.’ The burden, of course, fell
on the willing shoulders of the mistress of the house, who,
fortunately, amused by the circus which revolved around

Aet. 48 ‘Internal Medicine as a Vocation’ 461

them, played her r6le with an imperturbability matching
his own. Somehow, despite school duties, a speech at the
opening of the new hospital of the University of Maryland,
and other calls, he managed to compose another impor-
tant address, delivered on October 19th at New York, on
‘ Internal Medicine as a Vocation In this he set out to
emphasize the fact that the student of internal medicine
cannot be a specialist ; and he proceeded to explain what
elements in his estimation went to make the great physician
— men of the type of Austin Flint, of James Jackson, and
Jacob Bigelow. He warned the New Yorker against the
besetting sin of ‘ Chauvinism, that intolerant attitude of
mind which brooks no regard for anything outside his own
circle and his own school ’. And he recommended the
breadth of view which only comes from travel, though not
heedless of the truth of Shakespeare’s sharp taunt :

How much the fool that hath been sent to Rome

Exceeds the fool that hath been kept at home.

The address might almost be transcribed as an autobio-
graphical sketch, so closely does it reflect his own modus
vivendi. Visualizing a young Lydgate, who does not get
entangled in the meshes of specialism and whose object is
to become a pure physician, he took him through what
Sir Andrew Clark had spoken of as the three stages — the
dry-bread period, the bread-and-butter period, and the
period of cakes-and-ale. All things come to him who has
learned to labour and wait, but ‘ let him not lose the
substance of ultimate success in grasping at the shadow of
present opportunity ’.

. . . How shall he live meanwhile J On crumbs — on pickings
obtained from men in the cakes-and-ale stage (who always can put
paying work into the hands of young men), and on fees from classes,
journal work, private instruction, and from work in the schools.
Any sort of medical practice should be taken, but with caution —
too much of it early may prove a good man’s ruin. He caimot
expect to do more than just eke out a living. He must put his
emotions on ice : there must be no ‘ Amaryllis in the shade ’, and
he must beware the tangles of ‘Neaera’s hair’. . . [And:]

... at the end of twenty years, when about forty-five, our

^ Reprinted as No. VIII in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses ’, 1904.

462 Letters : Science : Practice Autumn 1897

Lydgate should have a first-class reputation in the profession, and
a large circle of friends and students. He will probably have precious
little capital in the bank, but a very large accumulation of interest-
bearing funds in his brain-pan. He has gathered a stock of special
knowledge which his friends in the profession appreciate, and they
begin to seek his counsel in doubtful cases and gradually learn to
lean upon him in times of trial. He may awake some day, peihaps,
quite suddenly, to find that twenty years of quiet work, done for the
love of it, has a very solid value.

He went on to consider the cakes-and-ale period, and
divided the consultants as a class into intra- and extra-
professional. The latter, caught in the coils of the octopus,
were deserving of sincerest sympathy :

One thing [he says] may save him. It was the wish of Walter
Savage Landor always to walk with Epicurus on the right hand and
Epictetus on the left, and I would urge the clinical physician as he
travels farther from the East, to look well to his companions — to see
that they are not of his own age and generation. He must walk
with the ^ boys ’, else he is lost, irrevocably lost ; not all at once
but by easy grades, and everyone perceives his ruin before he, ^ good,
easy man is aware of it. I would not have him a basil plant, to
feed on. the brains of the bright young fellows who follow the great
wheel uphill, but to keep his mind receptive, plastic, and impression-
able he must travel with the men who are doing the work of the
world, the men between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

And finally, after warning against ^ the temptation to toy
with the Delilah of the press who, sooner or later ^ sure
to play the harlot, has left many a man shorn of his strength
he ends with this paragraph :

In a play of Oscar Wilde’s, one of the characters remarks ; ^ There
are only two great tragedies in life : not getting what you want —
and getting it ! ’ and I have known consultants whose treadmill life
illustrated the bitterness of this moty and whose great success at sixty
did not bring the comfort they had anticipated at forty. The
mournful echo of the words of the preacher rings in their ears, words
which I not long ago heard quoted with deep feeling by a distin-
guished physician : Better is a handful with quietness, than both
hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.’

These quotations grow too many and long. ’Twere better
for medical students young and old to ponder over the
original address — even to its single foot-note to Lydgate,
which says : ‘ This well-drawn character in George Eliot’s

Aet.48 Marry the Right Woman 463

Middlemarch ” may be studied with advantage by the
physician ; one of the most important lessons to be gathered
from it is — marry the right woman/ ^ Most happily
married himself and knowing how often the tragedy of
Lydgate was repeated in the profession. Osier used to
reiterate the warning to his young friends to keep their
affections on ice. His advice was not always taken. There
was found among his papers this draft in pencil of an
unfinished letter to a young graduate, which tells its own
story :

Dear , Do not worry, you could not offend me, ‘nof^dld you

fool me altogether. Although I did not refer to it, I had a feeling
that you had made up your mind. Long experience has taught me
that, in these cases, advice is sought to confirm a position already
taken. In the affairs of the heart, in which I have had a long and
curious experience, I do not remember an instance in which my
adverse counsel was taken. From the West, one day, a family group
of anxious Hebrews came to consult me on the advisability of
the son — an early phthisiker — marrying. There could be no two
opinions ; the old people on both sides were greatly pleased, and
the young ones, though sad, seemed contented and agreed to wait
until he was quite well. As they streamed out, the patient said :

‘ Doctor, a word with you please, alone. I think it only fair to say
that, knowing very well what your advice would be, we got married
before we left Kansas City.’

I was quite touched by your letter. Of course, I know you love
her, or think you do, which at this stage of the game is the same
thing. Only remember that the blind bow-boy plays the devil

^ Among Osier’s notes for an intended Introduction to the Littera-
ria section of his library catalogue there is a long one which reads in part as
follows ; ‘ Ask the opinion of a dozen medical men upon the novel in which
the doctor is best described, and the majority will say Middlemarch, Lydgate
is at once an example and a warning. . . . An unmitigated calamity, his
marriage ruined his intellectual life in a soul-wasting struggle with worldly
annoyances. . . . George Eliot was happy in her relations with the profession,
and we owe her a deep debt for this Early Victorian sketch of it m a pro-
vincial town. It is often said that my Brother Regius of Cambridge, Sir
Clifford Allbutt, was the original Lydgate. Nothing in their careers is in
common, save the training and the high aspirations. There is a basis for
the statement. When Dr. Bastian lived at Hanwell, one Sunday afternoon
he had just returned from a visit to George Eliot, and the conversation
turned on Middlemarch which had recently appeared. He said that the
matter had been discussed in her house that afternoon, and she confessed
that Dr. Allbutt’s early career at Leeds had given her suggestions.’

464 Letters: Science: Practice Nov -Dec. 1897

with us sometimes. I tried to warn you against what I felt was an
indiscreet marriage. You have a career ahead of you which the
right woman will help, the wrong woman wreck. A level-headed
fellow can do anything he wishes with a wife if love blossom into
trust, gentleness and consideration. A doctor needs a woman who
will look after his house and rear his children, a Martha whose first
care will be for the home. Make her feel that she is your partner
arranging a side of the business in which she should have her sway
and her way. Keep the two separate. Consult her and take her
advice about the house and the children, but keep to yourself, as far
as possible, the outside affairs relating to the practice. . . .

A meeting of the newly formed Maryland Public Health
Association, organized early in the year and of which Welch
had been made President, was held in the hall of the
Faculty, November iSth-igth, when abattoirs, water
filtration, school sanitation, and such subjects, were dis-
cussed. The deliberations of one whole evening were given
over to the old question of Baltimore sewerage, and in this
relation Osier again spoke vividly of the existing conditions,
and their connexion with typhoid mortality :

. . . The penalties of cruel neglect have been paid for 1896 ; the
dole of victims for 1897 is nearly complete, the sacrifices will number
again above 200. We cannot save the predestined ones of 1898, but
what of the succeeding years ? From which families shall the victims
be selected ? Who can say ? This we can predict- — they will be of
the fairest of our sons and of our daughters ; they will not be of the
very young, or of the very old, but the youth in his bloom, the man
in the early years of his vigour, the girl just wakening into full life,
the young woman just joying in the happiness of her home. These
will be offered to our Minotaur, these will be made to pass through
the fire of the accursed Moloch. This, to our shame, we do with
full knowledge, with an easy complacency that only long years of
sinning can give, . . .

By means of its published report, widely distributed
throughout the State, this meeting served to stimulate even
the smaller hamlets to some conception of their public
health obligations. And though, as H. B, Jacobs has said,^
such writing as Osier’s was not only convincing but was
intensely moving, and played no small part in securing, in

^ ‘ Osier as a Citizen and his Relation to the Tuberculosis Crusade in
Maryland’. Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, July 1919.

Aet. 48 In the Interests of Baltimore 465

the end, proper sewage disposal for Baltimore, it is not
unlikel7 that the imagination of the Marylander accustomed
to frequent, on occasion, what is known as a ‘ raw bar ’
was still more moved by the paper of W. K. Brooks the
zoologist, who hinted that every drop of water entering the
Chesapeake Bay had a good chance of having its bacilli
filtered through the gills of an oyster.

He took upon himself at this time the onerous task of
collecting funds for the purposes mentioned in the subjoined
note sent to the doctors throughout the State. There is
nothing about it, however, which would suggest the kindness
of heart that was his underlying impulse, for one purpose
was to supply a scholarly physician in Baltimore, who was
in needy circumstances, with a literary task he was well fitted
to accomplish. The notice read : ‘ The Medical & Chirur-
gical Faculty at the celebration of its one-hundredth
anniversary will issue a volume containing the annals of the
profession of Maryland, and an account of the Proceedings
of the Centennial Meeting. The price of the volume will
be $2.00, and all names should be sent to Dr. William Osier,
I West Franklin street, Baltimore.’ And so, with the usual
shower of brief Christmas notes, such as ‘ Dear Flexner,
that is a bully piece of work ! I am obliged for it in such
a handsome dress. Do not work too hard this winter.
Yours, W. O.’, which rained from l West Franklin Street,
the year passed, and with it Revere’s second birthday.

1898

Consultations were beginning to call him afield, and his
triennial Text-book revision was impending, as he indicates
in this note to Lafleur on January 27th :

Dear Laffie, How are you? Well & strong again I hope. I heard
of your return through Mrs Bullitt. If Pepper writes you about
some articles for the Am. Text Bk of Med. 2nd Edition — do under-
take them. We are all well — rather sad at Weir Mitchell’s severe
loss. His daughter aet. 23 died on Thursday of Diphtheria & Mrs. M
is still seriously ill. I have been tramping the country this month —
Florida, Richmond & Rochester in rapid succession. Send me
memos as to alterations in my text book. Mrs Osier sends love &
Tommy would if he could.

2923 I

Hh

466 Letters: Science: Practice Spring 1898

‘ Tramping the country ’ though he was, his institutional
responsibilities were ever in his mind. So, on February 9th
one finds that one of the first donations ever made to the
Johns Hopkins Hospital, as mentioned in the IXth Report
of the Superintendent, is a fund for the study of tubercu-
losis, ‘ through the liberality of benevolent individuals who
desire that their names be not mentioned, . . . that tuber-
culosis be studied in all its aspects, as to causes, means
of communication, prophylaxis and treatment.’ ^ This,
apparently, is the donation he subsequently referred to as
having been given by ‘ two ladies — God bless them ’, and
it is quite probable that he was led to contribute to it
himself, because just at this time the ill health of a number
of the students made it clear that their living conditions,
no less than those of the consumptives who came to the
dispensary, needed to be thoroughly looked into.®

The many incidents of this busy winter must be briefly
passed over. Fanned by the yellow press and the war-cry of
‘ Remember the Maine ’, the smouldering embers of war
threatened frequently to burst into flame, and Osier thought
about it what other intelligent people did. Meanwhile,
a new building was going up in the medical school lot, to
house physiology and pharmacology. A leper by mistake
got admitted to the hospital ; a nurse was discharged who
refused to attend to her ; and Osier made the patient the
subject of a clinic.® An announcement went forth that the

^ In later Reports this announcement was changed to the following :
^ Through Dr. William Osier, from himself and other interested friends, as
a fund for the study of tuberculosis.’

^ Welch and Osier were appointed a committee to supervise these studies,
and their first report, which recorded that Charles D. Parfitt was appointed
to take charge of the work, appeared in the Superintendent’s Report published
a year later. Dr. Parfitt himself shortly became victimized by the disease.

^ ‘ Leprosy in the United States, with the Report of a Case.’ Johns
Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, Mar. 1898. It is recalled by one of the students
of the day, now Professor C. R. Bardeen, that this patient had been studied
for some days in the dermatological clinic, where one physician by detailed
differential methods had proved before the class that the case was one of
cutaneous syphilis, and another physician on the following day had proved
with equal conclusiveness that it was tuberculosis. At this juncture Osier
happened to walk through the dispensary one morning with his satellites,
caught sight of the woman sitting on a bench, and exclaimed : ‘ Look
at this ! This is the first case of leprosy I’ve seen since I was in Tracadie.’

Aet. 48 From Dan to Beersheba 467

Frick Committee of the Faculty had come into possession
of $600 to be spent on books, and the committee would be
glad to receive suggestions from physicians of their needs,
which ‘ may be sent to Dr. William Osier, i West Franklin
Street The Book and Journal Club was thriving, and had
managed since its inception to put $1,200 worth of books
on the shelves of the Faculty’s library. Meanwhile, his
Wednesday clinics on the winter crop of pneumonia had
begun. Some got into print and serve to give an idea of the
intimate character of these exercises. On March ist he
wrote to Ogden, making idle promises about playing golf :

Dear Ogden, D.V. I leave for England immediately after my
exams — early in June. Sorry not to be able to go to Denver [the
annual A. M. A. meeting for 1898] but I need a good rest & hope
to get off for three months if I can induce Mrs. O to take Ike. I wish
you could take ten days or two weeks with us this spring — say May.
You would enjoy a good rest & it would be a great pleasure to have
you. I will promise to play golf with you three or four times a week.
The boy thrives. I have been horribly driven — ^literally from Dan
to Beersheba. I never have been so much away.

Other letters of the time indicate that, however ‘ horribly
driven ’, he was dipping into the Text-book revision pre-
paratory to the third edition ; also that Ogden paid his
visit earlier than May, and his kodak of Revere on his
father’s back shows that the boy was thriving. During the
spring recess, accompanied by his nephew and Barker, he
took a brief holiday in the South, coming back ‘ much
refreshed ’, as told in one of Mrs. Osier’s letters written
behind the scenes on April 19th ; and the letter states
further that she has ‘just written thirty dinner invita-
tions for the 26th, which verifies what you say about my
constantly being at my desk ’.

The Maryland Faculty held its one-hundredth annual
meeting with a four-day programme, beginning on April
26th, which accounts for the ‘ thirty dinner invitations
As Chairman of the Executive Committee Osier announced

^ The President for the year was Dr. Charles M. Ellis of Elkton, a man of
unusual attainments, the heau ideal of a country practitioner. W. T. Council-
man came from Boston and gave the principal address of the occasion, on
cerebrospinal meningitis, which had appeared in epidemic form in Eastern
Massachusetts.

H h 2

468 Letters: Science: Practice Apr.-Mayi898

at the business session that, in response to the circular issued
the previous spring, $4,300 had been subscribed towards
the $7,000 debt on the building. ‘ Our present home ’, he
declared, ‘ is an advance on our old one, but it does not
represent suitable quarters for the profession of a city of
500,000 inhabitants. We need a new building, and an
endowment fund for the library ; and what we need,
Mr. President, we can get with concerted action on the part
of the profession and our friends.’ Osier was determined
this mortgage should be lifted, but the attention of his
hearers was doubtless distracted by other matters. For on
the day before the meeting convened, Congress had declared
the existence of a state of war with Spain, and there was
talk of an invasion of Cuba, where more to be feared than
Spanish guns were typhoid and malaria, smallpox and
dysentery. Worse even than these was yellow fever, and
tire Surgeon-General, who read a paper at this centennial
meeting, had promptly issued a call for immunes among the
profession to accompany the troops as contract surgeons.^
They were not difficult to find, for yellow fever had been
rampant in the Southern States the preceding year.

The ‘ American Physicians ’ held their thirteenth annual
meeting in Washington the next week,^ with F. C. Shattuck
as their President. On this occasion Sternberg gave another
paper on the subject of yellow fever, quoting with dis-
approval Sanarelli’s experiments and discrediting his claim
that the Bacillus Sanarelli was the causal agent of the
disease, for it proved to be identical with his own previously
described ‘ Bacillus X ’, on which Walter Reed and James

^ Surgeon-General Sternberg himself had had yellow fever, was con-
sidered an authority on the subject, and had written much on the bacterio-
logy of the disease. A veil had best be drawn, however, over the medical
history of the expedition to Cuba. Nor need the British War Office be much
more proud of what happened that same year in the Soudan under Kitchener,
where medical officers were hardly thought necessary.

^ The day before this meeting, on May 2nd, with Osier’s backing, the late
George M. Gould, then Editor of the newly established Philadelphia Medical
Journal, called a meeting in Philadelphia which resulted in the organization
of the Association of Medical Librarians, whose purpose was the fostering
of medical libraries and the maintenance of an exchange of medical literature.
Of this society Gould was made the first President, and subsequently under
Osier’s influence the organization was held together in ways that will be seen.

Aet. 48 War and Yellow Fever 469

Carroll had been working. V. C. Vaughan in the discussion
had mentioned as ‘ ridiculous ’ Sanarelli’s experimental
inoculations on man, and Osier is reported to have followed
with an emphatic denunciation of these experiments.
Even granting, he said, that every dose of medicine we give
is an experiment, to deliberately utilize a human being for
the purpose without the sanction of the individual ‘ is not
ridiculous, it is criminal It was a condemnation, the
publicity of which stood Osier in good stead two years later.

Thus were the pieces fitting together. The invasion
of Cuba ; yellow fever ; Reed and Carroll ; a God-sent
Governor-General who had been a doctor ; experiments on
man — for U.S. soldiers did give their sanction ; the dis-
covery of the transmitting agent ; Havana freed from the
disease and yellow fever driven into its last ditch — all of
which might not have happened — so soon, at least — if the
battleship Marne had not been blown up in Havana harbour
on January 24 of this year.

Some time during the month it became noised about that
Osier had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of
London,^ of which Lister was then President. This honour
had previously been accorded to few Canadians, though
before the revolt of the colonies farther south, there had
been several, like Benjamin Franklin, entitled to write
‘ F.R.S.’ after their name. His mother wrote on May 19th :

My dear Willie, — A line to congratulate you on the step up the
Ladder of Fame. I do not think it will exalt your pride or vainglory
but it is certainly most gratifying to us all and must be especially so
to you and Grace. Nellie was going to send a Tel. but I did not
like her going over late in the evening and said I would write but
could not manage it somehow yesterday. . . . W. F. generally sends
all sorts of scraps to his mother about your precious little lad and
I get them through Jennette, most amusing some of them are.
I am longing to see you aU, and counting off the days as they pass
tiU the 5 th or 6th of June. Do come as soon after that as you can,
but you must be very much rushed here and there — and sorely need
a sea voyage to rest you. I know you have to go to England and
nothing will be better for you — there were disappointments when
you did not come on from Buffalo and I know that as usual you will

^ He was recommended for election by the Council, May 5, 1898;
formally elected June 6, 1898 ; ‘ admitted ’ June 8, 1899.

470 Letters : Science : Practice May-july 1898

not get much rest in Toronto. ... My heart goes out towards you
all ; dear Grace I’m sure feels low about this horrid war. . . .

Too much was made of this Fellowship, by press and
public, for his peace of mind, and though he submitted to
a complimentary dinner on May 24th he escaped the next
day to New York for a meeting of the Neurological Associa-
tion, held at the Academy of Medicine. He was on the
programme and read a paper, though it may be assumed
that he spent a good deal of his time browsing among the
old books in the rich collection of the Academy, enviously
comparing it with the library of the ‘ Faculty ’. He stayed
at the University Club, for he abhorred hotels and hotel
lobbies where he was apt to be waylaid by reporters and by
bores, whom he never suffered gladly. ‘ This is Dr. Osier,
I believe ’ To which he would be likely to reply : ‘ No-
sorry — often mistaken for him. My name is Davis —
E. Y. Davis of Caughnawauga.’

To F. J. Shepherd from W. 0 . i West Franklin St. [June 8]

Dear F. J. Sorry to hear you were knocked out. I wish you had
come on here for repairs. The F R S was a great surprise. I suppose
Foster set it up. I had no idea that my name had been proposed.
We have changed our plans. We had berths for the 1 3th but [Revere’s
coloured] ‘ Mammy ’ struck & would not go, fearing the dangers
of the sea. Then Mrs O’s heart failed & she decided to go to Bar
Harbour for the summer & has given me six weeks leave for a trip
to England. I sad. on the 9th of July. Wish we were going together
I shall see you in London 40 Clarges St. will be my address. . . .
Mrs 0 & Ike left for Toronto on Monday I go on the 18th. I am
over head & ears in my 3rd Edition — infernal nuisance

Early in the preceding month the Marylaird Public
Health Association, which in its short year of existence
had accomplished such unlooked-for results under Welch’s
presidency, held its second meeting at the ‘ Faculty ’ hall.
The affairs of the organization were coming to take more
and more of Welch’s time. He had acted as Dean of the
Medical School since its opening, and after presenting to
Mr. Gilman on June 14th at the commencement exercises
the second group of candidates for graduation, 26 in all, he
resigned his deanship in favour of Osier — another ‘ infernal
nuisance ’, which, however, he assumed with his customary

Aet 48 Dean of the Medical School 47!

imperturbability, though it is not certain that he was a very
energetic Dean. He took the responsibility lightly ; there
was, indeed, little at any time about the school machinery
to require more than occasional oiling, and he was good
at this. With the close of the school session, the usual
post-graduate courses began, and though these were largely
taken over by the junior members of the hospital staff, who
thereby eked out their meagre university salaries, Osier
always participated. Thus on June i8th he gave them
a clinical lecture, using cerebrospinal fever as his text ; for
the epidemic had in mild form reached Baltimore, and there
were seven cases in his wards. He probably, too, as was his
custom, gave the graduate students a reception, though with
Mrs. Osier away, and floors, tables, and chairs doubtless
strewn with the manuscript of his Text-book revision, this
year’s reception could hardly have been held at i West
Franklin Street. Before leaving Baltimore some two weeks
later, he scribbled this note to W. S. Thayer :

Miss H. will tell the postman to leave all my mail at the Hospital
until after Aug. ist. Will you open the letters (unless marked
personal) and answer those to patients — nabbing any you can. The
Trustees, under a misapprehension (W. tells me) did not pass your
salary increase. It is all light W. says Sc can be arranged without
question. So if you hear of it do not be worried in the slightest.
Hope you will have a good summer. My address is 15 Queens Park
till July 1st. I sail 9th on Etruria.

So to 15 Queens Park, his brother B. B.’s ’ house in
Toronto, he repaired, ^ bringing with him plenty of work
as stated in one of his mother’s letters ; and from there in
anticipation of the coming Edinburgh meeting of the
British Medical Association he wrote to J. G. Adami on
July 1st :

Friday.

Dear Adami, Yours of the 28th reached me here, where I have
been for a week with Mrs. Osier and Egerton Y (Jr.). I am delighted
to hear of the cirrhosis work. Do send the material &c. with Stewart.
I shall be only too glad to read the paper for you and show the
specimens. Have you notified the secretary of the Med. Section?
The discussion on cirrhosis is in it — I think. It will be quite startling
— but what a comfort to the thirsty Scotsmen ! Thanks for the
congratulations upon the F. R. S. It was very unexpected, and very

472 Letters: Science: Practice July 1898

much appreciated. I have been in the depths — a revision of my
text-book. I have knocked it to pieces. Sins of omission begin to
haunt me — as the sections are printed off. I had a note about your
interesting lipoma — and forgot it ! I shall look out for the paper
and specimens by Stewart. Love to ‘ little Mary Cantlie.’

In a letter of the next day to President Gilman, stating that
he is leaving for Bar Harbour on Monday and sailing on
Saturday ‘ to be absent only five weeks he adds something,
in effect that he sees no reason why Mr. Gilman should be
called upon in any way to help a certain Miss J . to finish her
biological studies because he has promised to do this himself.
In such ways Osier managed to keep his pocket-book empty
— ‘ to sanctify ’ his professional fees. The education of the
Locke children ; Miss J.’s biological studies ; the continued
support of certain boyhood friends who were having hard
sledding ; numberless things of this sort hardly to be
specified. He was not a good business-man, if that means
the accumulation of capital. A Canadian physician recalls
that during his student days he was once caught penniless
in Washington, and recognizing Osier, with whom he
was unacquainted, asked with embarrassment if he could
borrow $25 to get home. Osier said : ‘ That ’s not enough ;
here ’s fifty.’ He was the bane of the Baltimore charity
organizations. In an attempt to stop house-to-house
begging they had issued tickets which householders could
give to beggars, referring them to a central agency where
they would be given a night’s lodging and a breakfast in
return for wood-chopping. Osier nevertheless had an
agreement with black Morris that no one asking aid should
be turned away without money, and there was a box at the
door with ready coins for the purpose. Better a thousand
mistakes than one chance missed really to help some poor
devil in actual want. ‘ There was no discriinination ’, he
once said, ‘ in the charity of the Good Samaritan, who
stopped not to ask the stripped and wounded man by the
wayside whether it was by his own fault the ill had come ;
nor of his religion, nor had he the wherewithal to pay his
board.’ In other ways too he was irregular. He had
circularized the profession, as will be recalled, late in
December of the previous year, asking for two-dollar

Aet. 48 The Third Edition 473

subscriptions to enable the Maryland ‘ Faculty ’ to publish
a centennial volume which Dr. E. F. Cordell was to edit.
The subscriptions were few. It grew to be a large volume.
The cost of the printing was heavy, and in the end Osier
made up the entire deficit of two or three thousand dollars,
though there is no written record of this. Moreover,his name
headed the list of contributors to the University of Maryland
Endowment Fund being raised at this time, though only
the friends and alumni of the old school had been asked by
Dr. Cordell ‘ to rally to its support ’. Such a chance he
never missed — and usually gave doubly in that he gave first.

The Text-book he had indeed ‘ knocked to pieces
In the preface, evidently written in New York at the
Waldorf Hotel the evening before saihng, he says that
a text-book six years old needs a very thorough revision,
and that the present one had been wholly recast though
without being materially increased in size. He enumerated
the sections which had been rewritten or were new ;
mentioned those who had given help, especially Flexner,
Thomas, and Barker, in addition to those of his own staff ;
and at the end spoke of his obligations to Livingood , a victim
of the Burgogne disaster, who had been on his way for
a year’s study abroad and ‘ by whose untimely death the
Johns Hopkins Medical School has suffered a grievous loss ’.
From this he turned to send word to Flexner :

What an awful calamity this is ! Poor Livingood ! I cannot
realize it. Write a nice obituary notice of the poor fellow for the
Philadelphia Joui. next week. You know the details. Gould will
be very glad to have it. I left Mrs. Osier and Tommy at Bar Harbour.
What have you done about Cordell?

The revision had been a great labour. He wrote to
Mrs. Osier from the steamer on July 9th : ‘ It ’s a great relief
to have the book off my hands — I slept so happily — it has

The unprecedented success of the volume is shown by a note from his
publishers stating that ‘ the whole number of the second edition printed was
17,500 ; total of the two editions 41,000 ’. Naturally it was the source of
imitations, but by his revisions Osier kept well ahead of them. His friend
James M. Anders of Philadelphia had issued, through a rival publishing-house
in 1897, a ‘ Text-book of the Practice of Medicine ’ arranged on similar lines,
Some wag wrote a review of it, under the title Oder mit etwas Anders.

Two Scotch LL.D.’s

Aet. 49

475

you are not here. Your letter has just come — so glad to have good
news. I will cable on Saturday, I am delighted that you like every-
thing. Do take drives and spend all the money you wish.

Friday a m. We went to Earls Court in the afteinoon — saw the
sham naval battle — wonderful performance Margery enjoyed it so
much. The girls went to tea at 5 with Pa at the Jr Constitutional
Club. M. came home with me. At 7.15 we all dined with Hal at
a very swell restaurant and then went to Daly’s to see the Greek
Slave. Marie Tempest was so good. We enjoyed ourselves greatly.
With the exception of Ewart I have not seen a Doctor. My clothes
are progressing. I am going this a m about your cloak, and the
reefer for Tommy. I shall be very careful about the former. We
go tonight to the — I forget — at Ealing to dine, and this afternoon
to the Imp. Institute. It seems very long since I left you, but
Aug. 6th will soon be here. . . . Yours

Egerton.

If for the sake of his nieces he had eluded doctors and
formal dinners in London, it was to be otherwise in the
North, for after receiving his LL.D. at Aberdeen on
July 2ist, and reaching Edinburgh for the British Medical
Association meeting, his note-book records : ^ 25 th, dinner
Stewart 7.30 ; 26th, Gibson 7.15 ; 27th, Chiene — Turner
7.45; 28th, Fraser; 29th, Thompson — Greenfield 7.15/
Thomas Grainger Stewart, who held the Chair of Medicine
at Edinburgh (a position offered to Osier a few years later,
it may be added) was the President-Elect of the B. M. A.,
to succeed Roddick of Montreal ; and at the annual dinner
of the association, where was dispensed Scottish hospitality
at its best — to haggis and pipers — a good deal of banter
seems to have passed when Osier proposed Stewart’s health.

From the opening service at St. Giles’s Cathedral, to the
university ceremonial of the last afternoon given in the
beautiful McEwan Hall, there was probably little he missed
in the way of excursions, receptions, and scientific sessions.
Certainly he was at St. Giles’s, for the Rev. Alexander
White, D.D., Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland,
taking as his text ‘ The greatest of these is Charity ’,
gave a discourse on none other than the man Osier knew by
heart, and of whom the minister said : ^ The properly
prepared and absolutely ingenuous reader of the “ Religio
Medici ” must be a second Sir Thomas Browne himself. If
ever any man were a true Catholic Christian it was surely he.^^

476 An English Visit July-Aug. 1898

Certainly, also, he was at McEwan Hall, for there before an
audience of 3,000, he, with H. P. Bowditch of Boston,
Jonathan Hutchinson, Lauder Brunton, Broadbent, Kocher,
Mikulicz, Roddick, and others (including two Dutchmen
whom he was to visit the next summer) made up the nineteen
to whom the LL.D. had been accorded by the Senatus
Academicus of the University. He appears to have taken
no part in the scientific sessions except to make the promised
presentation of Adami’s paper,^ to whom he scribbled a note
saying : ^ Your paper went off very well — good audience.
No discussion. I think it rather paralysed them.^

He must have returned to London, and soon after went
on one of the quests in which he so delighted — this time in
search of field-records of Thomas Sydenham, for he had
exhausted the British Museum sources in the summer of
1894 and on this visit as well. His pocket note-book is filled
with notes relating to Sydenham and his contemporary
John Locke, to the Countess of Shaftesbury, and so on.
Among his papers, too, has been found a fragmentary sketch,
partly in pen, partly pencil, which begins thus :

I took the 11.45 from Paddington, and reached Maiden Newton,
Dorset, in about three hours. I wished to see the birthplace of the
great Sydenham and also to verify the entries in the parish register.
Wynford Church is only a chapel of ease connected with Little
Toller and as all conveyances of the villages were engaged at a picnic
I walked to the latter place about miles distant. . . . The Hos-
pitalers of St. John chose a pleasant site for the monastery of Toller
Fratrum. In one of the extensive valleys of Frome on the brow
of a small hill which lises abruptly from the banks of a small stream,
a farm-house and barn embody all that remains of the once spacious
establishment. The church is new and uninteresting save for
a remarkable font and the old Register from which I have given
you extracts.

Far from 4 :he madding crowd at Wynford Eagle, a hamlet or
chapelry belonging to Little Toller, in the garden of England, as
Dorset has been called, Thomas Sydenham was born. The place
belonged to the great honour or barony of Aquila or Eagle in Sussex,
which name it received from a Norman family named Aquila. The
estate passed from the Zouch’s to Thomas Sydenham, the physician,
through an ancestor in the reign of Henry VIII, The Sydenhams
were an ancient family divided into many branches. They were

^ ‘ On the Bacteriology of Progressive Portal Cirrhosis.’

Aet.49 Sydenham and Wynford Eagle 477

originally seated at Sydenham near Bridgewater and Kilsford
(Somerset) in the reigns of King John and Henry III. Hence issued
the various Sydenham families of Somerset and the Wynford Eagle
Sydenhams of Dorset.

And from here at some other time, possibly on the steamer,
he has gone on in pencil, very illegibly it may be said, to
describe the manor house at Wynford Eagle, where ^ without
a suspicion of the three centuries of world change ’ Sydenham
might return with no sense of that estrangement which is
given by the alteration of places familiar to our childhood.
He may have been thinking of Bond Head and his own
boyhood as he wrote these lines :

Of the childhood and youth of Sydenham we know nothing, or to
speak more correctly we have no records. In reality we know every-
thing ; childhood and youth are among the immutable things.
On the occasion of my visit I saw the little Sydenham running into
a lane near Toller Fratrum ; a group of children rushing helter-
skelter down the hill were followed at a distance by a bright-faced
little lad who at the sight of a stranger looked and screamed to his
mother. At the gate by the church at Wynford Eagle a chubby
boy of five was shouting to the shepherd dogs as they turned the
flock from the road into the field. Into the same field the little
Sydenham had doubtless often helped to drive the flock and I saw
him in my mind’s eye in the boy who with mimic stride went down
the road with the shepherd. And again as I sat on a stile, a lad of
twelve came through the hedge with a rabbit in his hand and a snare.
Joyous, happy days, full of those joys of country life which for
children are so much heightened in a large family of boys and girls.

Pressed in the book is a flower, ^ from the vine over the door
of the birthplace of Sydenham July 26, 1899 ^ ; so the
reader may expect to find him back in the garden of England
in another twelve months. He sailed on the Campania^
reaching New York on August 8th, when he first learned the
sad news of Pepper’s sudden death, and of the interment
on the 6th in Philadelphia. Too late to pay by his presence
the tribute he would like to have rendered, he went on
immediately, as planned, to join his family at Bar Harbour,
where he was laid low by one of his periodical infections.

To W, S. Thayer from W, O. Wednesday [Aug. 12]

I should have written at once but I am deep in a horrid cold
which I caught in an upper berth on the N. Y. N. H. & H. R. R,
I am delighted with everything here — the links are A.i. tho I have

Letters : Science : Practice

478

Aug. 1898

only been ont once. Campbell Sc Muriel Howard are here. Mrs,
Osier asked them as a surprise for me. What about the Smith house.
Would it not be better than the Carrolls’. I suppose it would not be
furnished. Perhaps Van Ness may be going to live there. I am so
glad that Flexner has decided to stay. Welch could not well have
spared him. It would be hardly worth while to go to Santiago now —
the troops would all be away in a few weeks. I believe we would see
quite as much in some of the northern hospitals to which the troops
are being sent. But you need fresh air & rest — not any more Hospital
work.

I see they have me secured for Pepper’s chair — even my photo in
the Ledger. Poor Pepper ! — they will never have his equal again in
Phila. They did not half appreciate him or what he did for them.
The U. P, would have been still on 9th Street, a three year school
& the other depts undeveloped had it not been for his amazing
energy Sc push. There is likely to be heart-burning over the appoint-
ment, Mitchell insists that I shall not say nay until after the
Faculty have met but I should only be worried to death by practice
in Phila. I see your sister every day. She is doing a miniature of
Tommy. Your father is away. Very glad to hear that Barker is
off Sc free — He must now buckle down at one or two good bits of
original work.

And so Philadelphia, not large enough to hold at one time
both these men, was to have neither of them. Always
deeply moved by the death of one of his friends, Osier
immediately sent a long obituary notice of Pepper to the
British Medical Journal^ and also set to work to prepare
a more formal memorial sketch.^ This he had intended to
read at the opening session of the medical school, but was
prevented from doing so by an attack of his periodical
bronchitis, more serious than usual, and contracted under
circumstances to be related. By the middle of August he
had written : ^ I am lowering my record at golf which is the
only matter of interest to me just now.’ But the remainder
of his summer was to be badly broken up and spent for the
most part in trains. He had been summoned to Buffalo,
and from there had gone on to see a patient somewhere in
Iowa. Soon after his return, he was called over one day
late in August to Winter Harbour to see Captain Arthur
Lee, and while there received an urgent message begging

^ Reprinted in ‘ An Alabama Student and other Biographical Essays ’
Oxford, 1908. The gist of this more finished sketch he sent later in the
autumn to the Mahogany Tree Club of Philadelphia, for a memorial meeting.

Aet. 49 ^ broken-up Vacation 479

him to come to Minneapolis because of the serious illness
of Walter S. Davis, one of the recent Hopkins graduates.
Davis, one of the most promising members of his class,
illustrates that curious tendency of physicians to become
victims of the malady in which they have specialized. He
had been doing some research work on pigments in AbeFs
laboratory, and during the year had begun to show such
a degree of pigmentation of his own skin that it was evident
that he had Addison’s disease, though up to that time
there had been no serious symptoms. From Minnea-
polis Osier returned to Canton to join Mrs. Osier at her
mother’s, and immediately had to leave for Toronto to see
his brother Edmund’s son, who was critically ill. During
this entire week, moreover, the country was prostrated by
an unseasonable and excessive heat wave. All this he tells
in the following letter from Canton to W. S. Thayer :

I found Davis very much better. He returned from the yacht
(Abel’s) feeling badly having had attacks of giddiness & nausea —
once or twice vomiting as well. On Tuesday Sc Wednesday he had
three or four fainting spells, one very prolonged & with a good deal
of collapse. They then telegraphed me. I was away in Winter
Harbour Sc did not get back until the eve. I left on Thursday Sc
got to Minneapolis Monday a m. He was very much better — quite
bright Sc it was simply impossible to realize, as we sat Sc talked to the
poor fellow, that his condition was serious. ... I have told him that
we would arrange leave for six mos. which will lelieve his mind very
much. . . , Unfortunately I have to leave for Toronto tomorrow
morning, a nephew is seriously ill. I shall not return here but go
down to Balt direct — reaching there on the 15th. What a deuce
of a summer you must have had ! I saw many in St. P & M who
asked after you. It is delightful to see the condition of the school.
Their laboratory equipment is A.i. Mrs. Osier came this a.m.
I got in at 6 p.m. She says you have sent on letters but I shall have
to defer the reading until the train.

On the next Saturday, from his brother Edmund’s home,
Craigleigh, Toronto, he again wrote to Thayer :

I found my nephew with (I hope) a sharp attack of peripheral
neuritis. The suddenness of onset looked alarming, as tho it might
be an anterior poliomyelitis, but the distribution Sc the condition
now are reassuring. I shall stay, to see that all goes well, until
Wednesday [14th]. Back Thursday a m [i.e. September 15th] early.

All this need hardly be mentioned except that it indicates

480 Letters: Science: Practice Sept. -Oct. 1898

how a physician of his standing may be called upon to pass
his vacation if he is within reach, and has a heart. Three
strenuous days — September 16-18 — were spent in Baltimore
over professional consultations, for patients and their
physicians were waiting to waylay him on his very doorstep.
On the 19th came an appeal from James G. Mumford,
a young Boston surgeon of literary tastes to whom he was
greatly attached, that he see a critical case with him in
consultation in Nahant. He acceded, and after a glimpse
of his wife and boy, who were still at Canton, he proceeded
to Toronto for another look at his nephew. The ‘ appoint-
ments ’ noted in his account-book for the year ended
abruptly on September 24th, and were not resumed till the
end of October. The reason is as follows :

On his way from Toronto in the middle of the night he
was called out of his berth by the porter, to see a woman, the
wife of a Baptist minister in Baltimore, who had recognized
him. She, poor thing, was in labour. Osier, in little more
than his pyjamas, with the porter’s aid got her into an
empty compartment in another car, gave her some chloro-
dyne which he happened to have, telegraphed ahead to her
husband and her doctor, and stuck to the distasteful job
himself till, reaching Baltimore, he brought the woman to
her doorstep in the very nick of time, for ‘ plump ’ the baby
was born in the vestibule. He must have dictated a few
letters that morning, as the following indicates :

To J, G. Adavii from W. 0 . Sept. 23, 1898.

Dear Adami, Your former letter reached me just as I was leaving
for Minneapolis, and I have since then been off to Toronto and back
to Boston, and have only just returned. I was very much interested
in it, and will give it to Flexner to read when he returns. The other
paper of which you speak in the letter received to-day I will look for
with interest. Thanks for the reprints. I was reading on the cars
this morning the hepatitis paper. The subject is one in which I am
greatly interested. You will see in the Text-book that I have rewritten
the sections on diseases of the liver, and I hope have made them
a little more practical.

And perhaps he saw a few patients, but later in the day he
took to his bed with fever and a bad cough. He was
evidently very ill, so much so that either Futcher or McCrae

Aet.49 Pneumonia and Convalescence 481

for several days hardly left his bedside, and Mrs. Osier,
^ smelling a rat hurried home. As a patient he behaved
very badly, would not have his windows open, would not
have a nurse, twisted his coverlets up, and, disliking to be
fussed over, refused to have his bed made — behaving, in
short, much as he said in his ^ Nurse and Patient ’ address
a man would behave, ^ wishing to turn his face to the wall
and sicken in peace The crisis came on the eighth day, to
the great relief of all, and though much used up he wrote
from his bed a note to Thayer, who had been away for his
holidays, giving some details of his illness and adding :

The Trustees passed on your salary all right — there had been
a misunderstanding. Jacobs is taking the 3rd year McCrae the noon
class & Futcher the 4th Sc clinic. Brown has decided not to come
to us [to take Davis’s place]. This leaves us stranded for the Clin,
Labor. I do not see what we are to do. Some one may turn up.
The weather has been infernal — 87-88 Sc saturated with moisture.
I shall go off for two weeks after a while — ^probably not before your
return. Do not hurry — ^All is going well.

This illness had interfered with many plans — among them
the giving of two promised addresses. One was the memoir
of Pepper ; the other was to have been delivered on October
4th before the Medical School branch of the Y.M.C.A. at
the opening of the school. A rough draft of this has been
preserved, on which is pencilled this note : ^ Written chiefly
on the train from Minneapolis to Boston, copied Sept. 24th
and 25 th.’ Evidently, therefore, he had it on his mind
during the first days of his illness. In a later hand he had
written : Just as well perhaps that I could not go.’ He
began the address by saying :

In such a gathering I have a feeling of embarrassment such as that
which overtook the son of Kish in the memorable incident after the

^ Apparently it was during this illness — for he always wrote a good deal
propped up in bed — ^that he had gone over the notes of his pneumonia cases
of the past winter’s session in preparation for a ^ leading article ’ solicked by
one of his friends, Burnside Fostei, who was about to launch a new medical
journal. The ardcle (‘ On the Study of Pneumonia % St, Paul Medical
Journal, St. Paul, Minn., Jan. 1899, i. 5-9) is largely devoted to the analysis
of the series of cases made by a fourth-year student, Mr. L. W. Ladd. It
contains a paragraph which explains why he laid such stress on the disease
before his students ; and ends with his favourite lines from Cowper which so
clearly distinguish between knowledge and wisdom.

482 Letters: Science: Practice Oct. -Nov. 1898

finding of his father’s asses. It has been my practice for years not to
talk on religious questions, holding with Mr. Rogers who when
asked of what religion he was, replied, ^ The religion of all sensible
men ’ ^ And pray Mr. Rogers, what is that ? ’ ‘ Why all sensible men
keep that to themselves.’ In many ways a very poor answer since it
comes within the scathing denunciation of . . .

And he goes on to divide people into Theresians, Laodiceans,
Rimmonites, and Gallionians, for into one or the other
of these ^ categories we are all ranged, not all of us knowing
in which h Of all this there is much more ; traces of what
he wrote are to be found in his Ingersoll Lecture six years
later. By October 7th he must have been well enough to be
up and about, for in a letter to J. G. Adami he says :

I was on the point of writing to you this morning, asking if yon
had heard anything from Allbutt, when I received a letter from
Chicago.^ He has fixed the 17th as the date of his visit here. I am
sorry to say I shall be away, as I am going to the mountains for
a couple of weeks to recuperate. We hope, however, that the
Allbutts will use our house. My nephew and Welch will look after
them, and they can be very comfortable and feel quite at home,
I am feeling all right again, though rather used up by the attack.

And not long after, on a Sunday there was posted from
Trucks ville. Pennsylvania, the following undated note :

Dear Thayei Sc Barker, Greetings ! You would not know me —
hardly — after three days in this earthly paradise I have gained
5|- lbs. Sc a few cc additional. To-day I have been out for several
hours walking over this beautiful farm, inspecting stock & mangels Sc
instructing the farmer on new points about clover as a fertilizer.
They have first class links here — greens in fine condition Sc my nurse
suggests that I telegraph for permission to do a little putting. I take
whiskey twice & millc thrice daily Sc I have gathered yarrow enough
for a good tonic and appetizer. I am reading Dr. Locke’s life Sc
works and altogether leading a dietetic philosophical Sc bucolic life.
Mrs Osier Sc Tommy send kind regards mingled with love.

Later in the month, a letter to Ogden postmarked
October 25th gives a resume of the summer happenings :

I had a bit of a knockout — ten days in bed with bronchitis &
a patch of flatness at the left base but no rusty sputa or tubular
breathing. Fever for 7 days & cough for ten — sudden stoppage of
both & rapid convalescence. I am at Hillside near Wilkesbarre with

^ Clifford Allbutt had been in San Francisco giving the Lane Lectures.

Aet 49

Back in Harness

483

the Conynghams, a delightful country place in the mountains.
I have gained 10 lbs. & am feeling very fit. I go back at the end of
this week. . . . Mrs O 8 c the boy are with me. The latter is getting
quite companionable. Do come on for another visit before long.
Mrs. O. thinks no one who stays with us is quite so nice. I had
a delightful time abroad. May Bath Sc Gwen Francis who is staying
with her came up from Swansea Sc stayed 10 days with me in London.
We had a royal time. Edinboro was a great treat. Two Scotch
LL.D’s warrant the addition of a Mac to my name. The F.R.S.
w^as a great surprise Sc a very pleasant one. The number of M.D.’s
of late years has been diminishing. All the boys are well. Thayer
has gone from the Hospital — is to practise in cons. Still helps with
the teaching. Futcher succeeds him.

He was back in harness by November, to the jubilation
of all at the hospital — staff, students, patients, and servants.
One who particularly rejoiced at the reappearance of this
man, with a drooping moustache, an olive complexion, and
unusual ways — a man unlike any other was Miss Elizabeth
Thies, the Librarian, whom he insisted on calling by a
variety of names, notably ^ Miss Thesis ’. M do not think
she writes, ^ that Dr. Osier ever missed coming into the
library when he came to the hospital. He had a warning
whistle which I grew to know as did the little children in
the ward. When they heard his whistle, they would look
to the door, never too sick to sit up and take notice and feel
happier for having seen the man we all learned to love and
worship. Many a scrap of a note he left on my table ’ — and
she sends many of them, of which these are samples :

8.5 5|- It seems a very shocking hour for you to arrive or not to
arrive. I want the Revue de Chirurgie of last year. Badly. W“^
OSLER,

[Again] Would the kind Fiaulein look in the Am. Jr. of the Med.
Scien. for years 1887-1893 for references to Endocarditis ? Osler.
PS. Will be in at ii^®:3 secs.

[Again] Uni Gottes Willen pasten sie nicht these labels over the
titles in the contents. W“ Osler.

As the last letter to Ogden indicates, Thayer had left the
hospital to enter consultation practice. He and H. B. Jacobs
had rented No. 3 West Franklin Street adjoining the Osiers’
— the one-time fashionable abode of a branch of the Carroll
family, still full of their beautiful old furniture and bric-a-

II 2

Letters: Science: Practice

484

Dec. 1898

brae. Here for the remainder of Osier’s Baltimore period
a succession of ‘ latch-keyers who were as much at home
in No. I as No. 3, had their abode, until one by one they
were picked off by marriage. No. 3 had the only telephone,
an abomination always to ‘ the Chief though occasionally
he was dragged reluctantly to it through the hole cut in the
fence to facilitate the circulation of the denizens of the two
dwellings ; and guests flowed freely from one house to the
other.

Dr. Thayer recalls a typical incident of the first day they
had set up housekeeping. Osier had said to him that
morning : ‘ What ’s the name of that old codger from
Boston with a white beard down to his middle I met at the
Maryland Club last night ? He wanted to know your
address.’ Thayer did not identify ‘ the old codger ’, but on
returning home found that a large box of provender —
cigars, interesting bottles, cheeses, and the like — had been
sent from the club, and though nothing was acknowledged
he knew that the Bostonian with the white beard was an
autumnal Santa Claus — and Osier did not brook being
thanked for his kindnesses.

In January of this year there had appeared the first number
of a new ‘ weekly ’ — the Philadelphia Medical Journal —
which had been launched with the financial backing of
Musser, Keen, Osier, and many others, and of which
George M. Gould was the editor. To this journal, which
had an all-too-short though successful career, the following
letter of December 31st refers :

Dear Musser, The Devil ! I suspected that the trustees would
be after Gould. The P. M. J. has been an eye opener to them. As
a matter of public (i.e. professional) policy I should say let him go.
The J. A. M. A. needs him now more than we do & he could put
the Journal on a first class basis which would be a good thing for the
rank & file. Phila is surely not so reduced that a good successor to
G. could not be found. Da Costa would be the man of my choice.
He has both brains and energy & could hold the younger men who
have to do the work. With our sub. list & start, there should be no
risk of failure — ^not the slightest. The essential point is to have
a strong editor who commands the respect of his juniors & who can
get work out of them.

I have been laid up for three days with the grippe — not a bad

Aet, 49 The Outlook at ‘ U. P.’ 48 5

attack fever for only one day. Kelly was in last night — he had just
returned from Phila very much disgusted with the outlook at U. P.
He says that there is a strong feeling against White among the
younger men, who feel that with him in charge alone, the able men
among them would have very little chance. I did not know the
feeling was so strong. In medicine the fusion of the two departments
would be a good thing. Save only that it cuts you out of a full
chair. Tyson who is a clear minded soul feels thus, & spoke of it
while here a few weeks ago. Happy New Year.

CHAPTER XVIII

1899

AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

^ I AM SO distiessed to hear of Kanthack’s death — it is
a grievous loss to all of us. Poor fellow ! and he had so
much to live for and so much to do.’ So Osier wrote early
in the year in a note to Adami regarding the untimely
death of the man who had filled the Chair of Pathology in
Cambridge for only a short few months. And in another
note sent later the same day he urged Adami to write an
obituary notice for Gould’s journal, saying : ^ If you send
it by Saturday eve it will be in time.’ Thus he would
have others heed ^ the flighty purpose ’. It is tempting to
dwell on this habit of impulsive note-writing : for when-
ever occasion offered, a card always convenient to his hand
was scribbled and posted. Even when he received reprints
of other people’s papers — instead of the usual perfunctory
acknowledgement, if any at all, he would invariably send
some sort of personal message. So, in a note of this time
to H. P. Bowditch :

Dear H. P. Greetings to you and yours ! I have just been
reading your Reform in Medical Education ’ with every bit of
which I fully agree. To one relief of the early congestion you did
not lefer — ^viz. the exclusion of Chemistry (Gen. Sc Lab.) from the
strictly Medical curriculum. We found here that it is a great boon —
the students have a three months course only in Physiological
Chemistry. There are schools in the country (U. P. for ex.) in
which the Chemistry takes up more time in the first two years than
any other subjects. I have abandoned didactic lectures altogether —
but I talk a great deal (with my feet dangling fiom a table which
I find is a great help). Your lecture will do good. Love to all at
home.

Even his briefer messages were apt to have some twist
out of the ordinary, like the following on the back of a
calling-card left for one of the nurses who had come down
from Hamilton, Ontario, to enter the training school :

Will you please if you can get off (without disturbing the equan-
imity of the Vestalia, and without distress to any of your youthful
companions) come to tea at 4.30.

Aet.49 An Influenza Epidemic 487

And at this time a succession of notes was being sent
to Dr. and Mrs. John A, Mullin or to their son, in Hamilton,
Ontario. His acquaintance with the old doctor dated back
to the days when as a medical student he had gone from
Montreal to Hamilton to see a case of trichinosis with
Archibald Malloch, Sr., who was Mullin’s friend and con-
temporary. During his recent Christmas visit to Toronto
he must have stopped off to see Dr. Mullin, who was ill,
and on his return wrote encouragingly asking for news.
Every few days a cheerful message of some sort went to the
old doctor :

Dear Mullin, How goes the battle ? With Israel I hope. I left
you in bed Sc rather wretched after a sharp attack of pain. I hope
you aie up again and doing what you can in the way of work without
tiring yourself. Let me hear soon how you are.

Dear Mullin, I was very glad to have your letter to-day — to
hear the more cheerful news of your breadbasket. Do take it easy
& make the young Doctor do most of the work. I should have
answered Mrs. Mullins letter which I was very glad to have, but
I have been very much driven for the past ten days.

An epidemic of influenza prevailed at the time, nor did
Osier escape, as is evident from his mother’s letters, which
express concern about her ‘^Benjamin’, and which admit
that she herself, because of the infirmities of ninety-four
years, ^ often feels the grasshopper a burden But when
housed by temporary illness his wheels nevertheless con-
tinued to revolve. On January 9th he wrote to H. M. Hurd,
who for years had shouldered the responsibilities of editing
the hospital publications :

We should have a meeting at an early date about the Bulletin.
I have asked Mall to have a chat with you about it. I think there
should be an Editorial Committee composed of you and Mall and
Abel and Howell and a couple of the younger men, with Smith as
Secretary to do the proof-reading and to relieve you of all the worry
of it. There should be not the slightest difficulty in arranging for
the Medical School fund to stand some of the expense, as it has
practically been the organ of the Medical School since the School
started. I hope to take up work tomorrow. I feel quite myself
to-day.

He was sufficiently himself to put together another of his
stirring addresses on ^ The Problem of Typhoid Fever in

488 After Twenty-five Years Feb. 1899

the United States ^ — an arraignment of the national short-
comings in matters of public hygiene and sanitation — given
in Albany on February ist before the Medical Society
of the State of New York. To-day, in spite of our many
schools of hygiene, our special laboratories and princely
funds devoted to the purpose, there is no voice or pen
comparable to his — able in like fashion to rouse the pro-
fession and the people to their duties. He said that the
. very staleness of his subj ect was a warrant for repetition,

^ that its triteness made earnest reiteration necessary, for
the country had had a very bitter lesson in the war — a sad
conclusion to a brilliant victory. He reviewed the history
of typhoid in the country ; told of the labours of Louis’s
pupils and their writings on the subj ect ; and outlined the
progress of our knowledge leading up to the triumphs of
sanitation. ^ That imperfect drainage and a polluted water
supply means a high mortality rate from typhoid fever is
the very alphabet of sanitary science.’

Let us turn [he said] from this picture with its glowing colour
to a more sombre canvas. Last autumn this nation, in the moment
of victory, had a rude awakening, a sudden conviction, a hard lesson.
A voice like that heard in Ramah went up throughout the land —
‘lamentation and weeping and great mourning’. From Montauk
Point to San Francisco, from Minneapolis to Tampa, Rachels weie
weeping for their lads, cut off by a cruel disease. The most bloodless
campaign in history was followed by a relatively greater mortality
from disease than in any recent war, and chiefly from this very
disease over which I have been chanting the paeans of the triumph
of our profession. To us these autumnal dirges rang no new tune ;
we had heard the same in the palace of the rich, in the crowded
tenement, in the hospital ward, in peaceful New England valleys,
in the settler’s shanty of the far West, in the lumberman’s shack,
in the mining camp. Year by year we had listened to the Rachels
of this land weeping for their fair sons and fairer daughters, not
killed by any pestilence that walked in darkness, but by a preventable
sickness that destroyed in the noon-day — the noon-day of the
intelligence of a civilized people. People asked each other, what
did it all mean I Nothing more than a slight extension of the judge-
ment upon criminal neglect of sanitary laws. . . . This is a nation of
contradictions and paradoxes. A clean people, by whom personal
hygiene is carefully cultivated, displays in matters of public sanitation
a carelessness which is criminal. A sensible people, among whom
education is more widely diffused than in any other country in the

Aet. 49 Campaigning against Typhoid 489

world, supinely acquiesces in conditions shameful beyond expression.
I do not propose to weary you with statistics, of which our Journals
and Reports are full, but I will refer to a few facts drawn at random
from three cities and three States, illustrating this shocking neglect.

And he went on to expose Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the
national capital as examples of how in sanitary measures
we were a generation behind Europe :

The solution of the problem is easy. What has been done in many
parts of Europe can be done here ; the practical conviction of the
people is all that is necessary. Upon them is the responsibility.
Let us meanwhile neither scold nor despair. The good-natured
citizens who make up our clientele, pay our bills and vote the
straight party ticket, have but little appreciation of a scientific
question, and are led as easily (more easily) by a Perkins or a Munyon
than by a Lister or a Koch. Under the circumstances it is marvellous
so much has been achieved in fifty years. ^ The larger sympathy of
man with man which we physicians are called upon to exercise
daily in our calling, demands that we continue our efforts — efforts
often fruitless in results, but very helpful to ourselves — to educate
this foolish public. What is needed seems so easy of accomplish-
ment — the gain would be enormous ! We ask so little — the corre-
sponding benefits are so great ! We only demand that the people
of this country shall do what Elisha asked of Naaman the Syrian —
that they shall wash and be clean — that they shall scour the soil on
which they live, and cleanse the water which they drink.

On the same day, in an extemporaneous address ^ to the
Albany medical students, he emphasized three things : the
good fortune which was theirs in entering medicine just at
that time ; the doing of the day’s work without too much
thought of the morrow, which gave a chance for his favourite
quotation from Carlyle ; and lastly, the need of cultivating
equally the head and heart :

There is [he is quoted as saying] a strong feeling abroad among
people — ^you see it in the newspapers — that we doctors are given
over nowadays to science ; that we care much more for the disease
and its scientific aspects than for the individual, I don’t believe it,
but at any rate, whether that tendency exists or not, I would urge
upon you in your own practice to care particularly for John and
Elizabeth, as George Eliot says, — but I will not add, especially for
Elizabeth — but to care more particularly for the individual patient
than for the special features of the disease. . . . Dealing, as we do,

^ Cf. Albany Medical Annals^ 1899, xx. 307.

490 After Twenty-five Years Feb.-Mar. 1899

with poor suffering humanity, we see the man unmasked, exposed
to all the frailties and weaknesses, and you have to keep your heart
soft and tender lest you have too great a contempt for your fellow
creatures. The best way is to keep a looking-glass in your own
heart, and the more carefully you scan your own frailties the more
tender you are for those of your fellow creatures.

Science, however, was by no means forgotten, for the
staff at the Hopkins one and all were busily engaged in
forwarding knowledge as best they could. This spirit even
pervaded the undergraduates, and such a discovery as had
been made by T. R. Brown two years before regarding the
eosinophilia of trichinosis well atoned for the hours over
the microscope counting blood-cells to which the Hopkins
students of the day were subjected. Brown at this time
having just reported his fourth case, Osier was led to review
his own personal experiences with the disease,^ and to his
former assistant, C. N. B. Camac, wrote as follows :

2.9.99.

... So glad of the gall-bladder article. It will do too for our
third Typhoid studies at which I am at last at work. I have been
much driven this winter — so much on hand and so many calls.
By the way look out for the mild cases of trichinosis at Bellevue — ^The
eosinophilia is most remarkable. Thayer has just found a 6th case
in a nurse in town. It is really a very good blood find. You remember
one of the cases when you were here. The Associate Professor
[Thayer] is doing so well — a good many calls out of town. We still
miss you & your good system — The new school I hope will make
progress Schurman was here a few weeks ago — full of hopes Sc plans.
Mrs. O Sc Ike are well — I hope to see you at an early date.

‘^So much on hand and so many calls.’ From January
to May of this year consultations were incessant — his after-
noon hours filled, and many demands from out of town.
Yet his other activities did not suffer, and each month saw
one or two papers published, not a few of them being sent
off to rejoice the editors of struggling medical journals of
little more than local reputation, to many of which he
permitted his name to be attached as collaborator. By this
time, also, announcements had begun to appear regarding
the coming anniversary of the Maryland Faculty, for

^ ‘ The Chnical Features of Sporadic Trichinosis.’ American Journal of
the Medical Sciences^ Mar. 1899.

Aet.49 So much on Hand ! 491

which a liberal sum of money must needs be subscribed —

‘ contributions to be sent as soon as possible to Dr. William
Osier at i West Franklin Street ’ ; and he took advantage
of every opportunity to appeal for funds, as he did on
Januaty 25th at a meeting of the Book and Journal Club,
at which time he described his visit of the summer before
to Sydenham’s birthplace.

February was the month of a memorable blizzard, and
on the 1 8th he wrote to Dr. Lawrason Brown, one of the
students who during his third year had contracted tuber-
culosis and had gone to join Trudeau :

PS. Adirondack drifts at — i West Franklin Stieet,

2.18.99.

Dear Brown, Greetings ! & best wishes for your pulmonic

health ! A nephew, Rev. H. C. G , of Toronto, has just developed

Tub. laryngitis 8 weeks duration. No trouble evident in lungs —
condition good — no fever but bacilli found. I wish him to go to
the Adtr. at once. I have written Trudeau asking about the Sani-
tarium’s private rooms but I tho’t it would save time to ask you to
let me know of some good boarding houses — ^with prices, &c. Love
to Oliver — I hope you are both on the primrose path !

A light-hearted letter, but, with another sent at the same
time to his nephew, telling him to cheer up his mother, for
‘ to know one’s enemy is half the battle ’, it shows that
he was serious enough and overlooked nothing in his behalf.

Early in the year he had accepted the invitation from
th6 West London Medico-Chirurgical Society to give the
Cavendish Lecture, and plans for another summer abroad
were already being made, as indicated in a note of March 24th
to one of the Francis ‘ nieces ’ from ‘ her loving old doctor ’,
which says : ‘We shall spend July & August somewhere by
the sea quietly & if you are in England it wiU be very jolly
to have you with us, with sister too — the bad thing. Revere
is fun now, & so full of mischief.’ But lest one lose track
of Osier in his daily rounds in the hospital wards during
the recital of all these extracurricular matters, a bedside
incident of the period recalled by Dr. Joseph Walsh may be
related :

In the spring of 1899 [he writes] shortly after my return from two
years’ medical study in Europe 1 first met Osier in the Johns Hopkins

492 After Twenty-five Years Mar. 1899

Hospital^ and he invited me to his house. . . . One of the cases he
showed me on his ward rounds next morning I have frequently
quoted since, on account of its encouragement to people afflicted
with less serious ills. She was an old woman of seventy-five, in the
hospital for acute rheumatism, who also showed a wind tumour of
Steno’s duct the size of a walnut, which she could inflate and deflate
at pleasure. Osier said it was the second one he had seen. Both of
these conditions, however, were incidental to her general histoiy.

‘ Mother,’ said Osier, ^ I would like you to tell Dr. Walsh some-
thing about your past life. When were you first in a hospital ? ’ ‘At
twenty-seven.’ ‘ What was the matter ? ’ ‘I had sarcoma of the
right knee.’ ‘ What did they do for it ? ’ ‘ They cut off the right
leg at the hip.’ ‘ Did you get entirely well ? ’ ‘ Yes, entirely well.’
‘When were you in again?’ ‘At forty-two.’ ‘What was the
matter ? ’ ‘I had cancer of the left breast.’ ‘ What did they do for
it? ’ ‘They cut off the left breast and left arm.’ ‘ Did you get
entirely well ? ’ ‘ Yes, entirely well.’ ‘ What are you in the hospital
for, now ? ’ ‘ For rheumatism ; and Doctor,’ she said, with tears

in her voice, and catching his hand, ‘ I hope you will make me well
in a hurry, because I have to go home to take care of my grand-
children.’ '

Osier, in short, never forgot the patient in his interest in
the malady, and this incident which has stamped itself on
Dr, Walsh’s memory could be reduplicated a hundred times
by the students. There was a tradition among the clinical
clerks that ^ if you want to see the Chief at his best watch
him as he passes the bedside of some poor old soul with
a chronic and hopeless malady — they always get his best

It is evident from the following note that some one had
offered a hospital ship to go to the tropics, but more
important at this juncture is the allusion to a missionary
tour nearer home :

To D, C. Gilman from W. 0 . 3.29.99.

It does seem a thousand pities not to do something with such an
offer & such a ship — but what ? She would be invaluable as a floating
Hospital in Manila. In Cuba the Government will doubtless feel
that private charity of this kind reflects somewhat on the War Dept.
A three months’ study of the malaiia problem in the West Indies
would be worth undertaking. We could supply the men for such
work. I am off with Tiffany on a missionary tour to Garrett &
Alleghany counties & wiU not return until Friday noon. I should
be glad to meet you & Mr Baker at any hour after then.

The ^ missionary tour ’ was for the purpose of arousing

Aet.49 The Faculty Centennial 493

in these counties an interest in the coming centennial of
the State Faculty. During the year he and a few others
with renewed ardour endeavoured to elevate the pon-
derous and inactive old society by its very boot-straps ;
and by trips to the counties, such as he mentions taking
with McLane Tiffany, who also was a member of the
Executive Committee, they succeeded in enrolling one
hundred new members. He even appears to have enter-
tained the hope that an endowment might be raised for
a new building, and wrote to James R. Chadwick, urging
him to come and make another speech. ‘ You stirred up
the brethren here & they have not forgotten it.’ It was
a vain hope. It was difficult indeed even to raise funds
sufficient to cover the expenses of the meeting, which was
planned on a generous scale fitting such an anniversary.
The responsibility of the affairs and general policy of the
society rested largely upon the shoulders of the small
Executive Committee of the Faculty, of which for some
years he had been Chairman. But in addition, he was this
year on the Board of Trustees, on the Library Committee,
and President of the Book & Journal Club, through whose
agency most of the book-purchasing funds were raised.

For months there had been advertisements in the
journals to the effect that persons knowing of old por-
traits or relics of interest in connexion with the Faculty
or the profession of Maryland were requested to notify
Dr. William Osier ; and that every physician of the State,
of whatever society, creed, or school, was urged to attend
a meeting which had such historical significance. Osier, of
course, did not do all this alone, but those who participated
recall that he was the chief moving spirit. There is little
in the printed records ^ about him except that he gave on
the opening night a dinner at the Maryland Club to the
Trustees, officers, and chief guests, a large reception at
his house on another evening, and a clinic on cerebro-
spinal meningitis one morning — but then, others did similar
things, too.

The centennial exercises were more like those of the

^ There is a long account of this successful meeting in E. F. CordelFs large
centennial tome — ‘ The Medical Annals of Maryland ’ — finally issued in 1903.

494 After Twenty-five Years Aprii-May 1899

great congresses, so successfully staged in later years, but
which were then less common — with clinics at all the
hospitals, with demonstrations, lectures, and exhibits at set
hours day by day, in the hope of arousing the interest of
the profession at large in their State society. An immense
amount of labour had been expended on the exhibits, which
for lack of space in the small Faculty home were put up
in McCoy Hall, one of the Hopkins University buildings —
the published works of the Maryland profession, works
relating to the chief epochs of medical history, largely
borrowed from the Surgeon-General’s Library, portraits of
distinguished Maryland physicians, and so on — for all of
which Osier and Welch were chiefly responsible. And
a memorable occurrence at one of the evening meetings,
which had a thin programme becairse of the non-appearance
of two out-of-town speakers, was when Welch stepped into
the gap and gave extemporaneously a resume of medical
history as illustrated by the exhibits in the hall. How the
local profession felt about the man in the background of
all this, can be surmised by the fact that at the fully attended
annual dinner held on the last evening, the President-elect,
Dr. Clotworthy Birnie, a country doctor, referred at the
close of his speech to the new county members who had
been drawn into the society, and to the good-will existing
between them and the Baltimore profession, saying : ‘ The
tact that was necessary to bring this condition about, and the
industry to apply it, is due in great measure to one man.’
When he had taken his seat there were insistent calls for
‘ Osier ! ’ who arose, and said :

It may not be known to the members of this Faculty that part of
the reason why I love my fellow practitioners in the country rather
more than my fellow practitioners m town is that I narrowly escaped
being a country doctor. I was brought up in the office of a country
doctor, and he has told me that the saddest hours of his life were
those he spent while I was his office student. I never did appreciate
drugs, and didn’t even understand the importance of keeping each
one in its proper place, but generally managed to put the morphia
bottle where the quinine ought to be, so my preceptor had difficulty
in the dusk to find them, and on one occasion he nearly poisoned his
best patient.

All of which probably refers to his days in Dundas assisting

Aet. 49 Who gets the Credit? 495

Dr. A. H. Walker, and the ‘ speck in cornea ^Ofi ’ entry.
But he went on in more serious vein to tell of the growth
of the library, the needs of the institution, the necessity
of an endowment, and the importance of a new building
in some degree commensurate with the age of the society
and its importance to the city and state. There was
no reason, he said, why, with united effort, they could
not have a first-class, well-equipped home ; there was no
reason why it could not be obtained within a short period.

‘ I would urge the members of the Faculty ’, he said in
closing, ‘ to take this to heart, and I intend to ask at the
business meeting tomorrow evening that a committee be
appointed to take this matter in hand and work it syste-
matically during the next year.’

Following the centennial came a visit from Trudeau, who
talked to Osier’s class on some questions relating to tuber-
culosis ; and together, while Mrs. Osier took Revere for
a visit to his grandmother in Toronto, they went over to
Washington for the annual meeting, held May 2nd to 4th,
of the Association of Physicians. There, as usual, he took
an active part in the discussions and was down on the
programme for a paper on a peculiar form of bronzing of
the skin (Haemochromatosis), and presented a patient with
this rare malady, which was beginning to excite attention.^
In this paper due credit was given to his recent house
officer. Dr. Eugene Opie, for the special studies he had
made on the subj ect. In these matters he was most punc-
tilious. There is a story told of a visit William Pepper
made to the Hopkins to see the cUnical laboratory at the
time he was planning to erect a similar laboratory in
memory of his father at the University of Pennsylvania,
and in the course of their conversation, according to a
bystander, Pepper said : ‘ Osier, if discoveries are made in
such a laboratory as this, does the Director get the credit ? ’
The answer came immediately : ‘ Why Pepper, no ; the
worker of course ! Suppose we go to lunch.’

He must have busied himself during May with the
assembling, at least, of the material for his Cavendish

^ He was evidently hard pressed and used the same material for his paper
before the British Medical Association meeting later on.

496 After Twenty-five Years May-Junei899

Lecture,^ which contained an elaborate resume of the
experiences with all forms of meningitis in his clinic. The
paper, however, was devoted largely to the epidemic
form of the disease which had so widely prevailed in the
United States with a very high mortality — as high as
68‘5 per cent, in some localities. Such diagnostic pro-
cedures as lumbar puncture were at this time only just
being introduced, and a serum treatment of the disease
was hardly dreamed of — indeed, the man who was to
elaborate it was at this time serving on a commission in
the Philippines.

Their passages had been taken for May 31st, and he wound
up his curtailed school year with notes like the following
to John H. Musser : ‘ Janeway has appointed you and Fitz
and me a Committee to get up a memorial to Dr. W. W.
Johnston on the occasion of his retiring from the treasurer-
ship of the Association. I am sending out a little circular,
and my secretary will collect the money.’ Probably the
memorial to his friend Johnston had been his own sugges-
tion, and E. G. Janeway ^ of New York, who was President
of the Association of Physicians, had, as is usual under such
circumstances, put the suggester on the committee. And
there were other brief notes, such as : ‘ Dear Mr. Coy,
please call a meeting of the Medical Faculty for Friday
May 26 at 4.30. Sincerely yours ’, &c. Beyond such
missives there is little trace of Osier’s short service as Dean
of the Medical School ; and after holding the position for
this single year he was succeeded by W. H. Howell, the
Professor of Physiology, when the office of the Dean
became installed in a small room in the new building for
Howell’s department. Indeed, the medical school had
a way of running itself, with the aid of one person, this
selfsame Mr. George J. Coy to whom this request had
been passed.

From London, June 8th, he wrote to Ogden of a delight-
ful voyage, and added : ‘ Very interesting meeting of the

^ ‘ On the Etiologjr and Diagnosis of Cerebrospinal Fever.’ Tie West
London Medical Journal, 1899 Reprinted by W. O.

® It was Janeway who, a short time before, had, as the British papers put
it, saved ‘ to the cause of letters and manMnd the life of Rudyard Kpling ’.

Aet.49 The Cavendish Lecture 497

Royal Society this afternoon. I was admitted and had to
sign the book and be cordially shaken by the hand by Lord
Lister.’ ^ And a few days later to W. S. Thayer from
36 Half Moon Street :

We had a jolly trip over — fine skies & smooth seas. I really
enjoyed it. We did not get in until Wednesday night. I finished
my address on the S. S. & it is now in type. It will come out in
Lancet & B. M. J. of the week after next. I have been loafing since
coming here & have seen very few Doctors except at the Royal
Society where I heard Haffkine talk in very good form on India
& the plague inoculations. Glorious weather — ^hot for the Londoners.
We had a jolly day with Schafer in the country yesterday. He hopes
to get the Edinboro appointment in Physiology. Revere had the
time of his life on the S. S. Love to the boys.

Revere had ‘ the time of his life ’ whenever he was with his
father, and no child ever found a father a better playmate.
Some weeks later, from Swanage on the Dorset coast, the
boy of four summers dictated for H. B. Jacobs this laboured
note :

Dear Dr. Jacobs, I am having a good time. We have been in
London very hard. I like London. I got lots of toys at London —
some blocks too. We are at the seaside now. i, 2, 3, 4, 5. We have
a nice little house and a bathing tent and a pony. E. R. Osler.

They were indeed in London ‘ very hard ’. The Caven-
dish Lecture was delivered in the Town Hall, Kensington,
on June i6th ; at the conclusion of which, after being
subjected to the more than usually flattering votes of
thanks, in which he was likened to a modern Hippocrates
and his great diversity of talent was pointed out, he briefly
thanked the society for their reception and added that
whatever he had been able to do in his life had been accom-
plished by hard and persevering Work. With this carefully
prepared and technical lecture off his hands there began
a round of book shops and libraries, interspersed with
dinners and entertainments from which there was no
escape, since his old friends, E. A. Schafer, Sir Andrew
Clark, Lauder Brunton, Stephen Mackenzie, Jonathan
Hutchinson and others clamoured for him in turn. The

^ On June loth Osier was given a LL.D. {^n absentia) at the commence-
ment exercises of the University of Toronto.

2923.1 K k

498 , After Twenty-five Years 1^171899

only cloud to the summer’s happiness was the news of
the death on July yth of his old schoolmate, James E.
Graham, Professor of Medicine at Toronto, who in recent
years had selected for him from among the promising
Toronto graduates a number of the men who had become
his assistants in Baltimore.

Dr. Graham was one of my oldest friends in the profession [he
wrote]. During the session of 1868-9 he was a senior student in
the Toronto School when I wsls a freshman, and every Saturday
morning throughout the session we met at Dr. BovelFs to work
with the microscope. To both of us the memory of those happy
days was ever dear. It was a great privilege after the dry programme
of the week, to be brought into contact with a genuine enthusiast
who loved to work at as well as to think about the problems of
disease. On these occasions the only annoyance to Dr. Bovell was
the ^ damned guinea in Hunter’s phrase, and how often have we
laughed at the involuntary anathema which would escape the lips
of the good pious man when the maid announced a patient ! . . .^

They had gone out to Haslemere to pay a visit to Jonathan
Hutchinson, and to see the educational village museum and
the Memorial Holiday Home for London Children which
that high-minded old man had established. It was Hutchin-
son who suggested Swanage to them as a suitable place for
their summer outing, possibly because it was near Wynford
Eagle. However this may be, it proved a great success, as
the following extract of a letter from Mrs. Osier to Dr. Jacobs
testifies :

... I wish you could see the dear little house and garden we
have taken for six weeks. Swanage is below Poole and Bournemouth,
a quiet little place on a pretty bay with cliffs at either end — no
mosquitoes — no flies — no invitations — no southwest wind — no one
to bother us. We have two se wants with the house and all the
tradespeople call at the door, so housekeeping is no trouble. I am
enchanted with the garden. One end of the house is covered with
a rose vine and I am having a perfect treat. We are about one
minute from the beach where we have a bathing tent. Dr. Osier
is very happy. He has golf in the morning — then a swim, and loafs
all the afternoon. We hope to have Dr. McCrae here for a few
days and perhaps Dr, Halsted for a night. We were ready to leave
London — we had lunched and dined until we were nearly dead.

^ British Medical Journal^ July 29, 1899, ii. 317.

Aet.

A Summer at Swanage 499

Revere is so happy, it is a joy to see him. We will stay until August
25th5 then have a week in London before sailing on Sept. 2nd. . . .

To H, B, Jacobs from W. 0 . The Gwyle, Swanage, Dorset.

20th.

Many thanks for the chart. I am going to discuss endocarditis
at the B. M. A. I would try to get M. S.’s early record if possible.
You should report the case — the embolic features are remarkable.
Poor lassie ! It was a sad business. I hope Mr. D. has paid you.
I had not sent him any bill & I forget whether I put it on the July
list for Miss Humpton. We are enjoying this place greatly — ^fine
bathing, good driving, beautiful country, superb downs (R. calls
them ^ ups ’) & a most comfortable little house with good servants.
Mrs. Osier says it is a god-send. I sent a reprint of the Cavendish
Lecture to 3 W. Fr. I hope T. has forwarded it. Revere looks well,
badly sunburnt on his bare legs. We have had one day’s rain in six
weeks. The country is very dry — an occasional fog here keeps the
coast-line green. Kindest regards to your mother.

That Thomas McCrae, then an assistant-resident on
Osier’s staff, paid his expected visit is evident from a pocket
note-book of the period in which this has been scribbled :

A game of Sixes on Poundburg Ring. Players : Tom Lovell,
Ed Rowe, Dave Hayes, E. Y. D., T. McC. and a wall-eyed sheep dog.
On the north side of the celebrated Poundburg Ring, on the turf-
walk of the rampart at 3 p.m. July 26th lay three boys, two men and
a venerable dog. The positions were as in annexed diagram. Tom,
a tow-headed lad of i6, bossed the party and had the cards — a small
dirty, dog-eared but complete pack. The game he said was sixes,
Tom Ed.

Dog Dave

T. McC. E. Y. D.

which I did not know, so I put up '^d, in middle to be played for by
the boys, and that we could catch the trick of the game, Tom
dealt one first, then two, then three, not always in order and it was
evident that so long as each boy got six it did not matter how the
cards came. Ed led off with the ten of hearts which he called spades,
in ignorance I thought as he was young and looked a green hand ;
Dave covered it, trumped it he said, with a four or six of spades,
and Tom took the trick proudly with a face-card — the knave of
hearts.

It was an episode which Osier might have used to adorn
a tale and point a moral, but what was in ^ E. Y. D.’s ’
mind does not appear, though it shows an interest in children
and a capacity for amusement. There are other notes,

K k 2

500 After Twenty-five Years Aug. 1899

which indicate that he had been reading Jessop’s ‘ Life of
John Donne T. Longueville’s ‘ Sir Ken elm Digby the
‘ arch-amateur of all history ’ ; and the ‘ Letters and
Unpublished Writings of Walter Savage Landor by
Stephen Wheeler. Then under the date of August 12th
occurs the long description of a visit to the house of Benjamin
Jesty, the pre-Jennerian vaccinator — a note subsequently
turned over to McCrae to incorporate in his interesting
account of Jesty, read in the autumn before the Hopkins
Historical Club ;

Downshay (pronounced Dunsai). The farm occupies a delightful
situation in a valley between the Purbeck Hills and Nine Barrow
Downs, four miles from Corfe Castle. Leaving the Kingston Road
the house is reached by a rough and rutted road through the fields,
with many steep descents. It is not seen at first, indeed we did not
look for it as our whole attention was centred on the superb outlook ;
to the left in the setting sun the ruins of Corfe Castle, guarding the
gateway to the Isle of Purbeck — to the right the town of Swanage with
its fine blue bay, and far off on the horizon the white cliffs of the
Isle of Wight (the Needles), while across the valley rose the fine sweep
of the Nine Barrow Downs. Encircled by trees and in a depression
we did not see the house until we reached the barnyard where we were
cordially greeted by a jolly-looking dairyman who had just driven
out one herd and was preparing to finish the evening milking. . . .

They made other expeditions — to see the Roman remains
at Dorchester, where they spent the night, and there is an
amusing story of an old man in the tap-room who was
furious because the chimes kept ringing in the church
near by, and whom W. O., to pass the evening, egged on
to expostulate about chimes in general. From there they
went to Wynford Eagle, and it was on this visit that he
picked the ‘ rose from the vine over the door of Sydenham’s
birthplace And then to the little hamlet of Rampisham
in Dorset where Glisson is supposed to have been born,
and where they tried in vain to find the entry of his birth
in the parish church records of the sixteenth century.

Meanwhile, during the first week in August they had
attended the B, M. A. meeting at Portsmouth, and here,
in addition to giving his formal paper, he participated in
the discussions which had been prearranged for two of the
more important sessions of the medical section. The

Aet. so The Treatment of Tuberculosis 501

subject at one of them — a subject just beginning to be
thoroughly ventilated — was the Prevention and Remedial
Treatment of Tuberculosis, in which Clifford Allbutt,
Sir William Broadbent, R. Douglas Powell, Osier, James
Tyson of Philadelphia, who had just been appointed to
succeed Pepper, and others, all took part. Another session
was devoted to the Medical Tests for Admission to the
Public Services, and in the course of his remarks Osier
referred to ‘ the beneficial effects of general military train-
ing on the young men of the nation, as exemplified in
Germany, a benefit seen not less on their bodies than on
their minds, which while plastic learned the aU-important
lesson of life — discipline Little did he realize that these
plastic young minds and bodies were being so disciplined
that they might react to a caU to arms when ‘ the day ’
should arrive. And during this very summer, it may be
added, the delirium of the Dreyfus case was stirring France
to its depths, and the ill-fated Czar was making proposals
for a peace conference at The Hague.

Swanage proved, as the August letters testify, to have
been a ‘ haven of rest ’ ; and though with ‘ only one shower
in seven weeks the cattle were suffering and the sheep being
fed on the ill-grown carrots ’, it had been perfect for the
three who, before the summer was over, were all ‘ as dark
as Rebecca, Mammy’s substitute ’. Leaving his golf-clubs
behind, which ‘ looked like another summer in Dorset ’,
towards the end of August Osier went for a week-end to
visit the Allbutts and Nuttall in Cambridge, while Mrs. Osier
took Revere, who ‘ had not cried three times this summer ’,
to London preparatory to their sailing on September 2nd.
There, while W. O. was grubbing in the British Museum,
a Scotch nurse was engaged who was ‘ to come out in
October and take the place of the boy’s Mammy ’ whom
he had now outgrown. The last entry in the pocket note-
book of the summer reads as follows :

Brown, Sir Thomas, bought the ist authorized edition of the
Religio Medici 1643, from Quaritch, August 1899. £7. 7.

Aug. 2 <)th. Saw to-day the two unauthorized editions : — (a)
British Museum. Same publisher as authorized, Andrew Crooke,
1642. Same figure on title page, but between the extended arm

502 After Twenty-five Years Sept. 1899

aad the rock are the words ‘ Religio Medici and at one corner,
Will: Marshall, scu;. There are 159 pages. _ K. Digby’s Observa-
tions follow, (b) at Coll. Phy. Bound alone without Digby’s observa-
tions. Title page same as B. M. copy, 190 pp. (on a slip W. A. G.
[Greenhill] says ‘ This is a copy of the unauthorized edition and is
probably very scarce ’).

As likely as not, it was the purchase of this early edition
of the ‘ Religio ’ that led him into the bibliophilic pursuit
of gathering a complete set of all the editions.^ He pro-
bably had seen while in Portsmouth a good deal of J. Frank
Payne, an ardent book-collector, who happened to be
President of one of the B. M. A. sections, and, as may be
recalled, an effort was being made at this time to collect
funds for the erection of a monument to Sir Thomas
Browne to be placed in the shadow of St. Peter Mancroft.

From Canton, Mass., on September 12th he wrote to
his friend Shepherd in regard to an address promised for
the opening of the McGill session ; and three days later
from I West Franklin Street this to Simon Flexner :

Welcome home ! with, I hope, an undefiled hver and a smooth
colic mucosa. We were on the look-out for you in London, but
I suppose you hurried back via Frisco. I am most anxious to see
you and hear of your doings. What a delightful experience ! We
had a peaceful summer on the south coast. I saw Nuttall who has
taken Cambridge by storm. I have just returned. Let me know
if I can be of any use to you in the way of introductions.

The Spanish War, the responsibility of the Philippine
Islands, Leonard Wood’s great success as Governor-General
in rehabilitating Havana and the Province of Santiago, had
aroused Americans to some conception of the importance
of ‘ the white man’s burden ’. A very important part of
the load in Cuba, the Philippines, and soon in the Canal
Zone, had to fall upon the medical profession, and early
in the year a commission headed by Barker and Flexner had
been sent to the Philippines to investigate and to make
a report upon the diseases of the archipelago.^ To be sure,
this was only preliminary to what had to be Idone there,

^ Cf. Geoffrey Keynes, ‘ Bibliograpby of Sir Thomas Browne Camb.
Univ. Press, 192^ : dedicated to Sir William Osier.

® Barker, with J, M. Flint, one of the undergraduate members of the
commission, had returned home by way of India in order to study the plague
which was then rampant there.

Aet. 50 Lessons of the Cuban Campaign joj

and ere long Leonard Wood, though not in his naedical
capacity, volunteered to go to the Islands and persuade, in
one way or another, the head-hunting Moros to engage in
more peaceful pursuits.

As part of all this, great interest was being aroused in the
comparatively new specialty of tropical medicine. A school
had been established in Liverpool. A course to be devoted
especially to the study of tropical diseases was announced
by Osier, to be given at the Hopkins in the autumn.
Quit eras, himself a Cuban, had resigned from his position
as Pathologist at the University of Pennsylvania so that he
might go to Havana and work with the American Com-
mission which was investigating yellow fever. To his post
Flexner was to succeed, and hence Osier had asked if he
might be of use in the way of introductions.

To John H. Musserfrom W. 0 . 1 West Franklin Stieet,

Sunday

Dear J. H. I was on the point of writing to you last eve, when
someone came in. We returned last Sunday & I took Mrs O & Ike
to Mrs Revere’s & came here on Friday. The summer was a great
success. We took a house, on the Dorset coast & had two months of
peace sunshine sands & sea. The first month in London was very
pleasant. ... I have been book hunting & grubbing in the British
Museum & Record Office. I go to Montreal on Wednesday to give
the opening address at the college. I have not a copy of the B. M. J.
article. So glad to hear that the prospects are good at the Umversity.
I forgot to congratulate you on your appt. I did not hear definitely
until I saw Tyson at Portsmouth & after that forgot. I am sure
you win be able to arrange the work very comfortably. Do come
down soon.

•^On September 21st he gave before the assembled faculty
aud students of McGill the address, ‘ After Twenty-five
Years ’ ^ — from which the paragraphs reminiscent of his
days in Montreal have already been quoted in an earlier
chapter. For the benefit of the faculty he discussed the
many and different ways in which successful teaching may
be carried out, one of them, when classes are small, being
the elbow-to-elbow method under trial at Baltimore :

Undoubtedly [he said] the student tries to learn too much, and
we teachers try to teach him too much — neither, perhaps, with great
success. The existing evils result from neglect on the part of the

^ Montreal Medical Journal, Nov. 1899, 823-33.

504 After Twenty-five Years Sept. 1899

teachex, student and examiner of the great fundamental principle
laid down bp Plato — that education is a life-long process, in which
the student can onlp make a beginning during his college course.
The system under which we work asks too much of the student in
limited time. To cover the vast field of medicine in four years is
an impossible task. We can only instil principles, put the student
in the right path, give him methods, teach him how to study, and
early to discern between essentials and non-essentials. Perfect
happiness for student and teacher will come with the abolition of
examinations, which are stumbling-blocks and rocks of ofience in the
pathway of the true student. And it is not so Utopian as may
appear at first blush. Ask any demonstrator of anatomy ten days
before the examinations, and he should be able to give you a list of
the men fit to pass. Extend the personal intimate knowledge such
as is possessed by a competent demonstrator of anatomy into all the
other departments, and the degree could be safely conferred upon
certificates of competency, which would really mean a more thorough
knowledge of a man’s fitness than can possibly be got by our present
system of examination.

From this he went on to consider the congested state of the
curriculum, suggesting measures of relief that he ‘ would
recommend particularly to the younger men, in whose
hands alone such radical changes can be carried out. A
man he characteristically added, ‘ who has been teaching
for twenty-five years is rarely in a position to appreciate
the necessity of a change, particularly if it touches his own
special branch ’. Then, addressing himself more directly
to the students before him, he advised them to start with
no higher ambition than to join ‘ the noble band of general
practitioners who ‘ form the very sinews of the pro-
fession — generous-hearted men, with well balanced cool
heads, not scientific always, but learned in the wisdom not
of the laboratories but of the sick-room ’. And after
referring to the cultivation of interests other than purely
professional ones, he urges outside reading, and says, per-
haps with his summer’s purchase in mind, that ‘ the
“ Religio Medici ”, one of the great English classics, should
be in the hands — in the hearts, too — of every medical
student ’ .

As I am on the confessional to-day, I may tell you that no book
has had so enduring an influence on my life. I was introduced to it
by my first teacher, the Rev. W. A. Johnson, Warden and Founder

Aet. so A Mature Osier Speaks 505

of die 'Fiinity College School, and I can lecaU the delight with which
I first read its quaint and charming pages. It was one of the strong
influences which turned my thoughts towards medicine as a pro-
fession, and my most treasured copy — the second book I ever bought
— ^has been a constant companion for thirty-one years — comes viae
vitaeque. Trite but true, is the comment of Seneca — ‘ If you are
fond of books you will escape the ennui of life, you wfil neither sigh
for evening disgusted with the occupations of the day — nor will you
live dissatisfied with yourself or unprofitable to others.’ And,
finally, gentlemen, remember that you are here not to be made
chemists or physiologists or anatomists, but to learn how to recognize
and treat disease, how to become practical physicians.

‘ After twenty-five years.’ It was a more mature Osier,
wh.0 spoke with experience and authority, but the ideas in
the address were not very different — perhaps they never
are in such addresses — from those in his first valedictory
lecture of 1875, even to the inclusion of Sir Thomas Browne.
It seemed, however, less necessary than before to warn
against the temptation of drink, for ‘ nowadays ’, he said,

‘ even the pleasures of a medical student have become
respectable, and I have no doubt that the “ footing supper ”,
which in old Cote Street days was a Bacchanalian orgy, has
become a love-feast in which the Principal and even the
Dean might participate ’. Hundreds of introductory talks
for students, consisting, as a rule, of perfunctory admoni-
tions, are being given every autumn to the groups of young
men in all countries, who are entering medicine. But this
was an address of a different order : picturesque, appealing,
and written with apparent ease, which merely means that i
he had learned to conceal the effort which all good writing
requires, even in the gifted. The notable thing is that he ■
was willing to take so much trouble for such an occasion.

Of his other doings in Montreal there is no trace, but it
may be assumed that no old friend was forgotten ; that
the Howard children were very much excited ; and that
‘ Damphino Cook looking very proud, was circulating to
the new-comers, stories, on the side, of the good old days —

‘ me and the Dean ’. There must, too, have been talk of
the South African War, for a small Canadian contingent
had already been dispatched and Strathcona’s Horse was
being organized. How this distant war of none-too-happy

506 After Twenty-five Years Oct. 1899

origin touched Osier does not yet appear, though one of
his house staff at this time, ‘ Jack ’ McCrae, newly appointed,
was straining at the leash. ‘ If I can get an appointment
in England by going, I will go ’, he wrote. ‘ My position
here I do not count as an old boot in comparison.’ The ’
autumn semester at the Hopkins began on October ist, and
a few days later ^ he sent this note to Musser ;

I West Franklin Street,

10. 5.

Dear J. FI. So glad to hear of the new Edition. I will show it at
once to the class. What a nuisance that the publishers are always
ten days late ! Those new cuts are beauties. I began work this
week — ^larger classes alas ! but we have doubled the size of the 3rd
year dispensary class loom. They are after Futcher for Graham’s
place but I cannot let him off until a year from this date. We aie
all delighted at Clark’s success.^ You must have had the Provost’s
ear. I wrote warmly to Da Costa & to Tyson. The former sent
a most encouraging reply. It was a brave move on the part of the
faculty as C of course is not widely known thro the state. He is
a trump — v/e. never had a better fellow about the Hospital. Barker
is back — full of interesting information about the Plague in India,
Do come & see us soon. Yours ever, W. O.

Preparations at this time were under way for the next
international congress, to be held in Paris in connexion
with the World’s Exhibition, and as Osier had been called
upon to organize an American Committee, a vast deal
of correspondence followed with the several ‘ Presidents of
the American Medical Association and the Congress of
American Physicians and Surgeons, and of the national
societies forming part of the Congress, and the Surgeon-
Generals of the Army, Navy and Marine Hospital Service ’,
who were chosen to constitute the Committee. Meanwhile
the hospital wards were filled with the autumnal crop of
typhoids, and his pen was again busied with this more
interesting subject. As usual, he combined the duty of
his antityphoid propaganda with the pleasure of collateral

^ On that same day, October 5 th, the Association of Medical Librarians
held their annual meeting, a constitution was adopted, and 34 medical
librarians had become enrolled.

* John G. Clark’s appointment to the Chair of Gynaecology at the
University of Pennsylvania.

Aet. 50 Combining Duty with Recreation 507

reading and writing. Having promised to attend two
society meetings, one in New York and the other in Rhode
Island, he prepared for the first a succinct statement con-
cerning ‘ The Diagnosis of Typhoid Fever ’, and alongside
of this, for the second, he was engaged in a task far more
to his liking — the putting together of his sketch of Elisha
Bartlett :

To Dr, F, C, Shattuckfrom W, 0 . Monday eve

I have been enjoying a quiet evening with old Elisha Bartlett,
W. W. Gerhard, G. C. Shattuck Jr. & James Jackson Jr. — delightful
company after the Medico-Chirurgical Bulletin and trash of that
kind ! Your father’s papers I found in the Med. Examiner foi 1840
and Valleix gives a very full summary in Archives Generales for
Oct-Nov 1839. contribution is admirable. I had never seen

it before. Stille too has a paper which he read at the Societe d’Ob-
seivation some months before your father’s. It has never been
printed. I must get a copy from the old man for I should some day
like to collect the essays of W. W. Gerhard, your father and Stille
8c publish them together. X see dear old Sam Wilks is still undei
the delusion that Jenner in 1849-50 first clearly separated typhus
and typhoid 1 Yours [etc.]. P.S. Do come down this winter &
spend a quiet week. Soft old bed, breakfast in it at 9.30. Scotch
(hot) at 10 p.m.

This was his form of taking literary recreation, just as
in preparing his paper on the continuous fevers of the
South he had turned to an account of John Y. Bassett.
Unlike the ^ Alabama Student \ however, Bartlett needed
not to be rescued from oblivion, for he already occupied
an important niche in medical history, and his name as
one of Louis’s American pupils was often on the tip of
Osier’s tongue and at the nib of his pen.

In the first of these papers ^ he somewhat severely
arraigned certain members of the New York profession (one
of whom, it may be added, in somewhat sarcastic vein
subsequently replied) on their evident failure in many cases
to differentiate properly between malaria and typhoid :

One has [he said] to sympathize a bit with him — clinical fetishes
are given up with difficulty and regret : To many good, easy men

^ Contributed to a general discussion on typhoid at a meeting of the New
York State Medical Association, held on October 25th. Medical

Journal^ 1899, ixx. 673.

5o8 After Twenty-five Years Oci.-Nov. 1899

It came as a shock, to find that malaria was really a well-defined,
easily recognizable disease. Naturally, it was hard to abandon
a word like malaria, which carried with it as much clinical comfort
as did that blessed word Mesofotamia spiritual unction to the old
lady. My sympathies have been deeply aroused by the distress
which has been felt in many quarters of this city where you have
been, until recently, with some notable exceptions, heretics of the
worst kind. Nowhere, perhaps, has malaria ever covered such
a multitude of diverse maladies. . . .

He proceeded to give clinical rules of diagnosis which should
guide practitioners above Mason & Dixon’s Line, emphasiz-
ing that in these regions an intermittent fever which resists
quinine is not of malarial origin, nor is a continued fever
due to malarial infection, even though for variability of
symptoms the aestivo-autumnal infection takes precedence
even of typhoid fever. And he drew an amusing com-
parison between the temperature charts of the two diseases
— typhoid which has a ‘ Pennsylvania-Railway-like ’ direct-
ness, in marked distinction to the zigzag ‘ Baltimore-and-
Ohio-Railway ’ chart of aestivo-autumnal fever. He begged
the hard-worked practitioners of the smaller towns and
country districts, who found it difficult to apply the modern
scientific methods of diagnosis, to use their common sense
|and learn to suspect typhoid and not malaria in every case
!of fever of six or seven days’ duration. And in the course
of the paper he spoke of the country’s recent experience
with typhoid at the Chickamauga Camp, which was ‘ a
wholesale demonstration of the ignorance among the pro-
fession of the essential elementary facts concerning the two
diseases ’. Had he known of the fact he would probably
have added that steps were being taken elsewhere to
prevent a repetition of the experience of the American
army camps ; for the Professor of Pathology at Netley,
Almroth E. Wright, whom Osier must have seen at the
Portsmouth meeting of the B. M. A. the summer before,
was, at this very time, making his first tentative inocula-
tions of the British troops being mobilized for the South
African War, among whom severe outbreaks of typhoid had
already occurred.

The autumn meeting of the Maryland ‘ Faculty ’ was

Aet 50 Home Treatment of Consumption 509

held on November r4th in Westminster, Maryland, with
Osier as usual in attendance, and though the starred
feature of the programme was undoubtedly the report, by
Barker and Flexner, upon the medical conditions in the
Philippines, Osier’s short paper on ‘ The Home Treatment
of Consumption ’ should not be overlooked, for it is of
historical importance^ He estimated that there were
some eight or ten thousand cases in Baltimore alone, of
whom only a possible 5 per cent, could receive treatment
in sanatoria ; and he made a strong plea for greater atten-
tion to the living conditions of consumptives, instancing
the case of the brave young woman who at this time (he
had just been to Cumberland to see her) was, on his advice,
living out of doors at her own home — a novel idea in the
90’s. He never forgot her and she still lives to bless him.

The campaign against the ‘ white plague ’ was still con-
fined to a few members of the profession, and had not yet
reached the public. But the ball he had set rolling the
year before in Baltimore was already gaining momentum.
An active crusade to enlighten the public seemed to be the
only way to conquer tuberculosis, and traces of the move-
ment had already been apparent — an International Tuber-
culosis Congress at Berlin — the session at the B. M. A.
the summer before — the subject brought up at a State
medical meeting — finally brought home to a single institu-
tion which was among the first to gain recruits under the
banner of the white cross on a red field. Out of aU this,
as will be seen, the Social Service movement took its origin.

As a result of his McGill address two months before,
there had been a shower of letters from his old students —
to each of whom a personal hand-written acknowledgement
went in return : thus to Dr. J. H. Darey, whom in 1886
he had sent out to Iowa for his health :

n.17.99.

I was very glad to hear from you. My address has called out
letters from several of my old Montreal boys. What a hard road
you have had to travel ! I feel sure you will settle down to peace
& mental quiet as the years pass. A steady uniform life, 1/2 speed, as
little stress & strain as possible should obviate the tendency to these

^ Maryland Medical Journal, 1900, xliii 8-13

510 After Twenty-five Years Dec. 1899

recurrent attacks. You probably do not heed your domestic coun-
sellor enough. I was delighted to see the progress at McGill — the
outlook is good for a great medical centre. I am pegging away here,
very interested in the teaching of which I have a great deal. I send
you a bundle of reprints some of which may amuse you.

The address, ^ Elisha Bartlett : A Rhode Island Philo-
sopher a by-product, as has been seen, of his historical
studies regarding typhoid fever, was given in Providence
on December yth, before the Rhode Island Medical Society.
He was forever arousing in people in different localities an
interest in their local medical worthies. It was, for example,
customary for him to ask any one hailing from Cincinnati
when they were going to put up a monument to Daniel
Drake, for he had made a vow never to visit there until
one was erected. It was usual for them to admit that they
did not know who he was.^ So, on this occasion, in his
introductory paragraph he mildly rebuked his audience for
their neglect of Bartlett :

Rhode Island can boast of but one great philosopher — one to whose
flights in the empyrean neither Roger Williams nor any of her sons
could soar — the immortal Berkeley, who was a transient guest in this
State, waiting quietly and happily for the realization of his Utopian
schemes. Still, he lived long enough in Rhode Island to make his
name a part of her history ; long enough in America to make her
the inspiration of the celebrated lines on the course of empire.
Elisha Bartlett, teacher, philosopher, author, of whom I am about
to speak, whom you may claim as the most distinguished physician
of this State, has left no deep impression on your local history or
institutions. Here he was born and educated, and to this, his home,
he returned to die ; but his busy life was spent in other fields, where
to-day his memory is cherished more warmly than in the land of
his birth. . . .

He had secured from Bartlett’s nephew the letters and
family papers that enabled him to put together a bio-
graphical sketch, in which he particularly stressed his
student years abroad. And most sympathetically he treated

^ Osier’s interest in Drake must have gone back to 1894, for there are two
or three letters in October of that year indicating that he was in correspon-
dence with certain members of Drake’s family and had secured some letters
and documents regarding him. They are inserted in the copy of Drake’s
‘ Pioneer Life in Kentucky ’ in his library

Aet. 50 A Rhode Island Philosopher 51 1

of his career as a medical writer, of his brief experience as
editor of a medical journal, and of his life as a peripatetic
professor :

For many years there was in this country a group of peripatetic
teachers who, like the Sophists of Greece, went from town to town,
staying a year or two in each, or they divided their time between
a winter session in a large city school and a summer term in a small
country one. Among them Daniel Drake takes the precedence,
as he made eleven moves in the course of his stirring and eventful
life. Bartlett comes an easy second, having taught in nine schools.
Dunglison, T. R. Beck, Willard Parker, Alonzo Clark, the elder
Gross, Austin Flint, Frank H. Hamilton, and many others whom
I could name, belonged to this group of wandering professors. The
medical education of the day was almost exclusively theoretical ;
the teachers lectured for a short four months’ session, there was
a little dissection, a few major operations were witnessed, the fees were
paid, examinations were held — and all was over.

Teacher, philosopher, author, orator, and poet — on all of
these aspects of Bartlett’s remarkable career he touched ;
and appended to the essay, when published,^ he reprinted
one of Bartlett’s latest writings, the sketch of Hippocrates,
containing that imaginary scene of Pericles upon his death-
bed with the young physician from Cos in attendance, which
Osier regarded as a masterpiece worthy of Walter Savage
Landor — exceeded by few word-pictures in the English
language.

^ In ‘An Alabama Student and other Biographical Essays.’ Lend.
Henry Frowde, 1908.

Aet.5o An Address on John Locke 513

already under the supervision of Trudeau in the Adiron-
dacks ; but it was a different matter for the Baltimore poor,
who crowded the dispensary, and whose home conditions,
as will be related, had for the past year or more been made
a subject of investigation.

As the guest of the Students’ Societies of the Medical
Department of the University of Pennsylvania, he gave on
January i6th one more of his biographical essays, choosing
for his subject another physician-philosopher, though, un-
like Bartlett, whose philosophy was secondary, John Locke
was ‘ in all the colleges ’ and his medical career largely
forgotten. As Osier had written to Musser in the preceding
autumn after his return from abroad, he had again been
‘ hunting and grubbing in the British Museum and Record
Office’, much as on previous visits to London. From Syden-
ham, with whom he began, he had been led by the nose to
Sydenham’s contemporaries, and the great mass of manu-
script relating to the medical career of the philosopher
Locke had evidently come to his attention and been
thoroughly gone over.

His chief source of information regarding the intimacy
between these well-paired friends, Sydenham and Locke,
was the Shaftesbury papers, which had come to light since
John Brown’s essay had been written — an essay he had
reviewed thirteen years before in his ‘ Notes and Comments ’.
In this present address he dwelt at length on Locke’s
account of Lady Northumberland’s tic douloureux, but more
especially on Lord Shaftesbury’s malady — for the Lord
Chancellor had a suppurating hydatid cyst of the liver,
which, according to Pepys, Locke himself had operated
upon ; the cyst was for years drained by a silver tube
popularly known as ‘ Shaftesbury’s spigot ’, of which the
satirists and wits of the day made much sport. Having
considered Locke’s other medical writings, journals, records,
and commonplace-books, he ended as follows with the
philosopher’s rule of life which was much like his own :

For each one of us there is still a ‘ touch divine ’ in the life and
writings of John Locke. A singularly attractive personality, with
a sweet reasonableness of temper and a charming freedom from
flaws and defects of character, he is an author whom we like at the

514 The Edinburgh Call Feb. 1900

first acquaintance, and soon love as a friend. Perhaps the greatest,
certainly, as Professor Fowler says, the most characteristic English
philosopher, we may claim Dr. Locke as a bright ornament of our
profession, not so much for what he did in it, as for the methods
which he inculcated and the influence which he exercised upon the
English Hippocrates. He has a higher claim as a really great bene-
factor of humanity, one of the few who ‘ reflected the human spirit
always on the nobler side One of Locke’s earliest writings was
a translation for Lady Shaftesbury of Pierre Nicole’s ^ Essays in one
of which, on ‘ The Way of Preserving Peace with Men Locke
seems to have found a rule of life which I commend to you : ^ Live
the best life you can, but live it so as not to give needless ofience
to others ; do all you can to avoid the vices, follies, and weaknesses
of your neighbours, but take no needless offence at their divergence
from your ideal.’ ^

His interest in Locke was long-enduring, and when five
years later he, too, came to be a ^ Student ’ [i. e. Fellow] of
Christ Church and was given rooms there, he always claimed
that they were the ones Locke — until the time of his
expulsion by the peremptory order of the King — had
occupied before him.

On February 5th he wrote to Rolleston again about the
proposed tribute to Allbutt, adding :

I wish that I could go to South Africa We are of course most
deeply interested in the war. I am an optimist of the first water, and
see no reason for hysterics. What a bagatelle it is after all for the
Empire ! What are 200,000 men in the field ! And as for the
reverses — well ‘ sweet are the uses etc.’ It is sad for the poor chaps
who fall, but the stake is worth the sacrifice. England spent more
blood and money to make North America English than will be
needed to do the same for South Africa. All the decent people here
are with us and the war has done more to promote an Imperial
Spirit than anything that has ever happened in the recent history
of the colonies. . . .

As he himself had stated, Osier was British to the core,
and though a Christ Church studentship and the occupancy
of John Locke’s rooms could not at that time have existed
even in his dreams, there came shortly after this a call from
farther north which must have been exceedingly upsetting
even to his weU-practised equanimity. A hint of what was

^ ^John Locke as a Physician.’ Cf. ‘An Alabama Student and other
Biographical Essays ’. Lond., Henry Frowde, 1908.

Aet. 50 A Tempting Proposal 515

brewing was given in the postscript to a letter from
Edward A. Schafer, written on January 23rd, which says ;

^ I suppose you would not consent to transfer yourself to
Edinburgh in the event of a vacancy in the Chair of
Medicine which is extremely likely to occur before long.’
He could hardly have taken this very seriously, though
Schafer’s implication that his old friend Grainger Stewart
was near his end must have sorely grieved him. Stewart’s
death, indeed, occurred on the 3rd of February, and Osier
had knowledge of it when three days later, in reply to
Schafer’s query, he said in effect that he would be loth to
leave Baltimore, where he was happy and had a really
good clinic. He admitted, nevertheless, that both he and
Mrs. Osier would prefer to have Revere educated in the
old country and had been planning to retire to England in
eight or ten years.

On the very day this letter was posted in Baltimore
Professor W. S. Greenfield was writing from Edinburgh,
using all the arguments he could summon : that Stewart
had hoped he would become his successor ; that he would
be certain to get the post if he would only announce his
candidacy ; that no time was to be lost, and ^ a wire would
be desirable ’. It was a tempting proposal — the blue-
ribbon position in British Medicine — the famous Chair
which had been occupied by the Gregorys, Cullen, Allison,
and Laycock. That his immediate reaction was favourable
is indicated in this note to his sister Mrs. Gwyn — the
^ Chattie ’ of other letters :

I West Franklin Street, [no date]

Dear Lisbeth, So sorry not to have written before but I have
been in the traces as usual and hard at it between 8^^ & lo p m with
the daily routine. I have never been so busy or so much pressed
particularly with arrears of literary work. Ike is thriving finely —
still angelic, living a delightful life with Mowgli Sc Baloo Sc Bagheera
8c his jungle friends. The Scotch girl is a great success & he is
devoted to her. My friends in Edinburgh are very anxious that
I should be a candidate for the chair of medicine there vacant by
the death of Sir Grainger Stewart — ’Tis a great temptation & if it
Is offered to me I may accept. . . .

But when he was confronted by the necessity of formulating
an answer to Professor Greenfield’s letter that was at all

lIz

Feb. 1900

516 The Edinburgh Call

satisfactory, his pen actually balked, as is evidenced by his
first draft of the reply which was posted February 14th.
It is so interlined and scratched as to be nearly illegible, but
it says : I really am very comfortable here and have work
very much to my desire, but I tell you frankly I would rather
hold a Chair in Edinburgh than in any School in the
English speaking world.’ To judge from the halting way
his sentences were formed, the composition of this letter
must have tried his very soul. There is only one thing
missing to indicate his mood — the name of James Bovell
scribbled somewhere on the margin of the sheet. He
must have written to Schafer also, expressing how repellent
it would be to him to appear to be seeking the position by
announcing his candidacy and to engage in the contest by
soliciting testimonials — a procedure which characterizes
professorial appointments in British universities. But
however distasteful, he knew well enough that the appoint-
ment was made by a lay board, who had to be instructed,
and that an invitation was out of the question. Moreover,
some of his greatly admired friends — all of them Edinburgh
men, were already in the field.^

From E. A, Schafer to W, 0 . University Club, Edinburgh,

Feb. 20, 1900.

My dear Osier, — Nothing for a long time has given me so much
pleasure as hearing that you would be willing to come. The gift
is in the hands of the Curators of Patronage who are seven m number :
four appointed by the Town Council and three by the University
Court : permanent appointments. I am working all I can to get
them to invite you but everyone says it is useless as they have never
done such a thing before — ^however I am making out a strong case
and hope to be able to move them. [Sir William] Turner is the most
influential man in this University and I believe I have enlisted him
for you. The possibility of your coming here is being freely discussed
and in spite of local interests I do not doubt that you will carry all
before you from all that I can hear. In the meantime I have written
to Clifford Allbutt, Sanderson, Foster, Lord Lister, Brunton,
Pye-Smith, and am writing to others so that they may not pledge
themselves to support anyone else.

In the event of my being unable to induce the Curators to invite ^

^ One of them, at least, withdrew in favour of Osier on learning that he
might be induced to stand.

Aet. 50

Testimonials once more

517

and considering who they are it is unlikely they will do so (that
I must admit), you must send in a formal application after the post
is advertised, with a statement of your career and a list of published
works. You do not of course want testimonials except as a matter
of form, but I would get all those people I have mentioned to write
to the Curators and press your claim, and any others you might
think of. I will write further and let you know how the matter
progresses. Yours ever,

E. A. Schafer.

Many other letters passed, those from Edinburgh stating
that there was no mechanism by which a man could be
invited ; that, although the Curators felt bound to proceed
in the usual fashion and to advertise the vacancy, the date
for the closing of applications had been advanced for his
benefit till April 14th ; that Nature^ the ^ British Medical \
and the Lancet would all insist on his paramount claims, but
that he must go through the usual form of making applica-
tion and submitting testimonials. The rival candidates were
Byrom Bramwell, John Wyllie, G. A. Gibson, and Alexander
James ; all Edinburgh men of unquestioned distinction,
most of them teachers of experience in the extra-mural
school. Against these men and their expressed wishes and
deserts Osier was loth to submit his name as a contestant :

To E, A, Schafer from W. 0 . 3. 4. 00.

It is so kind of you to take all this trouble. If offered the Chair
I will take it ; but I cannot go into a canvass which would be most
repulsive to me, particularly as both Bramwell and Gibson are warm
personal friends. If on the ground, or in the country, it might be
different, but I feel very sensitive in applying for a position without
an intimation that I am wanted, except from you and Greenfield —
old friends. I do not like to be over scrupulous but I think it best to
write you just as I feel in the matter. . . .

More letters followed, those from London and Edinburgh
containing assurances of an enthusiastic welcome from the
profession : the position was the best Great Britain could
offer ; it would be a worthy crown to his career ; his terms
would surely all be accepted ; and he was requested to
cable his decision. It was made clear, however, that
by no possibility could an invitation of a formal kind be
given ; an application at least must be sent in ; others if
necessary could supply the information about his career

Si8 The Edinburgh Call Mar. 1900

demanded by the Curators of Patronage. One of them,
Lord Robertson, in answer to a letter from Sir Michael
Foster, urging Osier’s election without the customary
formalities, very properly replied :

While I fully believe that to those who know Professor Osier it
may seem absurd and superfluous that he should produce testi-
monials, yet your own experience will probably suggest that he must
remember that the electors are outside the circle in which even the
highest scientific reputations are known, and accordingly it would
be wise that this tribute be paid to our ignorance.

To E. A. Schafer from W, 0 . March 13, ^00.

After the receipt of your letter by this week’s mail I felt that
there was nothing left but to comply. I cannot tell you how deeply
I appreciate all the trouble you have taken in the matter. I have
sent in the application, and will send in a list of my published works
and papers by the S. S. of the 17th, if I can get it printed in time.
I think copies of my collected Reprints are in the Library of the
R, C. of Physicians in Edinburgh, if not the ist, at any rate the
and and 3rd series of 1897. I have sent copies of some of my general
addresses to each of the Curators. Lord Strathcona and Lord
Mount Stephen would no doubt know some of the Curators, and
I shall write and ask them for letters. I have to hurry with this to
catch the steamer. I have been ^ on the road ’ and very much
driven. Love to the children, [etc]. PS. We too have been re-
joicing in the news from South Africa.

Undoubtedly the real explanation of his decision lies in
the sentence which says he has been very much driven, and
there may have been a subconscious thought of escape from
his accumulating professional burdens. The moment may
have come when a coin was tossed, as it had been in Leipzig
in the summer of 1884, and the next morning, March 14th,
a cable went to Schafer, saying : ‘ all right application
SENT OsLER.’ He had submitted, and an announcement of
the fact appeared in the British Medical Journal for
March lyth, to the jubilation of his many British friends.
But on this same day, at i West Franklin Street, Osier was
laid low, thereby escaping the perfect hullabaloo in Balti-
more which his decision produced, for it had been cabled
back from England and was headlined in the press. In his
account-book of the year, against the dates March 17-25,
there occurs the single entry — ^ Influenza — in bed ’. His

Aet. 50

Pressure too Strong

519

illness, the doubt it raised as to whether with his suscepti-
bility to pneumonic attacks he could endure the rigours of
many Edinburgh winters, the pressure from all sides to
hold him in Baltimore — all these led to a second cable on
March 26th to Schafer; ^application withdrawn local

PRESSURE TOO STRONG SO SORRY OsLER.’

To E, A, Schafer from W, O, Mar. 27th.

I felt very badly to cable yesterday as I did, but I was quite
unprepared for the outburst which followed the announcement to
my colleagues that I was a candidate for the Chair. I had no idea
that they would make it such a 'personal matter, and my special
associates and assistants in the Medical Department were so stirred
about it that my feelings were terribly harrowed. I suppose I should
have counted on a strong local opposition but I had no idea that
I should have to yield. After all, these men have stood by me for
ten years in getting the School organized and the Hospital in working
order. I am mortified to think that I should have caused you so
much trouble. It is in many ways a great disappointment to me as
I feel that I could have been very happy in Edinburgh. Mrs, Osier,
too, is quite disturbed. She was very willing to go. All my friends
in Canada have been very excited about it. . . .

The following letter from President Gilman expresses as
well as any the relief produced by his decision :

614 Park Avenue, Baltimore,
March 24, 1900.

My dear Dr. Osier, — I have just heard through Dr. Welch that
you have declined the extraordinarily attractive overture from
Edinburgh. You may be sure that every one of your associates,
Trustees, Professors, Sc Students, would have grieved deeply if your
decision had been different. In the short period of your residence
in Baltimore, you have won such a position, as no one else has held,
and such as no one can fill, if you ever give it up. In the hospital,
and in the medical school you have the utmost influence, while your
love of letters and your skill as a writer would give you the same
influence among our literary co-workers if they could only see and
hear you more frequently. Now I hope that nothing more attractive
than a call to Edinburgh will ever reach you, and that through
a long life you will continue to add to the distinction of the Johns
Hopkins foundations. Ever your sincere and grateful friend

D. C. Gilman.

Subsequent appeals from abroad that he would recon-
sider ; that they thought none the worse of him for having
won the hearts of the Baltimoreans ; that it was a call of

520 The Edinburgh Call Spring 1900

duty ; and that something tantamount to an invitation he
could not refuse would be issued, left him unmoved once
he had definitely altered his decision ; and though grieved
to have been the cause of so much trouble, he, outwardly
at all events, promptly dismissed the episode from his mind
and rarely if ever referred to it againd

While all this was going on during February and March,
to the distraction of aU concerned, there were other matters,
too, deserving of mention — the relief of Kimberley, for
example, and of typhoid-ridden Ladysmith — so that after
months of depression things were looking better in South
Africa — at least for those who were not Dutch. Then, too,
what was important. Revere had acquired a new pet, also
certain E. Y. D.-ish habits, of which his grandmother speaks
in a letter to her Dear Chattie :

In Willie’s last week’s letter he tells me that someone has presented
Revere with a young alligator for a plaything — worse than a pet toad
or rat I should think. W. F. says that he has generally to turn down
the clothes of his bed to look for slipper, comb or brush, but now
will have to be doubly careful or may find a still more unpleasant
bedfeEow.

Moreover, during these months, the antivivisection con-
troversy, which had received an apparent quietus in 1898
in consequence of Welch’s activities, had again come to
a head. It was the third and last attempt of the opponents

^ There is a volume in the Osier library, of collected papers entitled
‘Testimonials, Edinburgh University, Chair of Medicine, 1846.’ Osier’s
abhorrence of the testimonial custom is expressed in the following note which
he had written in the back of this volume fifteen years later :

‘ X11.26 15, Given to me by Dr. Harvey Littlejohn of Edinboro from his
father’s library. I am glad to have this tragic volume illustrating the most
venomous system of election to professorships, still perpetuated in the
Scotch universities, as the candidates seek testimonials far and near. One
rarely sees so extensive a list as that of Goodsir. The list of voters and the
result of the ballot at the end of Goodsir’s testimonials show that the election
was entirely in the hands of the Town Council, a committee of which still
shares in the election — ^the proportion I do not know. When in (?) I had
consented to be a candidate for the Chair of Medicine at Edinboro, Turner
and Schafer guaranteed me the majority of the votes of the Town Council.
In the depression associated with an attack of influenza, I cabled withdrawing
my name. I wonder what would have become of me at Edinboro — -whiskey
or John Knox ? I think I could have got on with the men as I have always
liked the Scotch. W. O,’

Aet. 50 Senate Bill § 34 521

of research to pass a regulatory law through the national
legislature; and towards this end Senator Gallinger had
introduced before the 56th Congress an amended or sub-
stitute measure under a slightly modified name and now
called ^Senate Bill § 34’. When this became known to
the scientists, a public hearing^ was demanded, and on
February 21st the advocates and opponents of the bill
appeared before the Senate Committee of the District, with
Senator Gallinger in the chair. W. W. Keen, H. P. Bow-
ditch, Bishop Lawrence, General Sternberg, Mary Putnam
Jacobi, and others including Welch and Osier, all spoke in
opposition to the bill. The major task, that of drawing
up an elaborate argument, had been assigned to Welch, and
his statement ended with this paragraph :

Surprise has been expressed that scientific men and the great body
of the medical profession in all parts of this country should concern
themselves so actively with contemplated legislation which in its
immediate effects relates to a very limited area and affects directly
the work of probably not more than a dozen men, if indeed of that
number. Our solicitude to prevent the passage of this act is not
greater than that of antivivisectionists throughout the country to
secure it. Our opponents have hitherto signally failed in their
repeated efforts to obtain the enactment of similar laws in the
various states. They now seek Congressional sanction in the hope
that it will promote their ‘ Cause ’ throughout the country.
We know, and scientific and medical men alone can fully know,
the dangers to science and humanity which lurk in what may
seem to some of you this unimportant bit of legislation. The
medical and biologic sciences have advanced in these later years
with strides unapproached and in directions undreamed of but
a quarter of a century ago. New vistas of knowledge and power
have been disclosed, the full fruits of which will be gathered
by coming generations. The main cause of this unparalleled pro-
gress in physiology, pathology, medicine and surgery has been
the fruitful application of the experimental method of research,
just the same method which has been the great lever of all scientific
advance in modern times. Strange as it may seem at the turning-
point of the century, we are here, not as we should be, to ask you
to foster and encourage scientific progress, but to beg you simply
not to put legislative checks in its way. Our own contribution to
this progress may now be small, but America is destined to take

^ Senate Document No. 337, Government Printing Office, Washington^
1900, 222 pp.

522 The Edinburgh Call Spring 1900

a place in this forward movement commensurate with her size and
importance. We to-day should be recreant to a great trust, did we
not do all in our power to protect our successors from the imposition
of these trammels on freedom of research. Our appeal to you is not
only in the name of science, but in the truest and widest sense in the
name of humanity.^

Throughout the hearing there was left no doubt in any
one’s mind of the Chairman’s position regarding the measure.
He had obviously been thoroughly coached upon the usual
antivivisection mis-statements, and under the mask of
senatorial politeness there was a good deal of sarcasm, short
of heckling, which must finally have upset Osier’s customary
imperturbability. His own testimony was very brief and
was confined to the single issue of human experimentation —
a matter on which, as may be recalled, he had expressed
himself vigorously before the Association of Physicians in
1898, when, in discussing Sternberg’s paper on yellow fever,
he had denounced Sanarelli’s experiments. One episode
had a humorous touch. Senator Gallinger persisted in
cross-questioning him ^ about the possibility that some
one, sometime, might possibly have permitted unnecessary
suffering in the performance of his experiments ; and Osier,
holding up an antivivisection pamphlet, replied with
considerable warmth that there was no profession about
which a similar set of disgraceful statements might not be
made and sown broadcast — ^ no profession, from politics
—up!’

Senator Gallinger : I hope that nothing very violently personal
may be indulged in. I will say that when I used the name of Mante-
gazzi, I meant Sanarelli. If I understand it, Mantegazzi made
experiments upon animals, but Sanarelli experimented with yellow
fever upon human beings. Of course we are glad to hear the remarks
of the gentleman with regard to vivisection. I will not call attention
to some matters that I had noted in that connection, because Dr.
Osier has denounced them vigorously. I will ask him this however :
Supposing, Dr. Osier, that I should offer a bill preventing human
vivisection, would you oppose it ?

Dr. Osler : Yes, sir ; as a piece of unnecessary legislation.

^ ‘ Argument against Senate Bill § 54, Fifty-sixth Congress, First Session,
generally known as the ‘‘ Antivivisection Bill

^ The stenographic report of the tilt may be found in the same ‘ Senate
Document No. 337, pp. 64-5.

Aet. 50 Yellow Fever Commission 523

A short three months later (May 1900) on the recom-
mendation of General Sternberg, a board composed of Reed,
Carroll, Agramonte, and Lazear was sent to Quemados,
Cuba, to pursue investigations relating to yellow fever which
had broken out among the troops stationed in Havana. By
a series of painstaking experiments conducted on human
beings who had the moral courage to volunteer for the
purpose, they first disproved conclusively that the disease
was contagious in the ordinary conception of the term, and
subsequently demonstrated, before the end of the year, that
the female of a certain species of mosquito (Sugomyia
fasciatd) was alone responsible for its transmission. Had the
discovery not been made, had one of the soldier- volunteers
who contracted the disease (rather than the lamented
Lazear, one of the Commission) died as a result of the
experimental inoculations, one can imagine what a howl
would have been raised on the fioor of the Senate in Washing-
ton. Had there not been an intelligent and courageous
Military Governor in Havana willing to take the responsi-
bility for the carrying out of these experiments without
getting the permission of Congress* — well, the Panama Canal
project would have been an impossibility.

During the Easter recess, April 4-10, a much needed
outing to recuperate from his influenza, no less than from
the Edinburgh distraction settled only a few days before,
was taken with H. B. Jacobs and T. B. Futcher — Thayer’s
successor as Resident Physician. They departed together
for Old Point Comfort, and put up at the old Chamberlin
Hotel, ^ whence they made various amusing trips by boat to
Mobjack Bay, Virginia, and also to the Dismal Swamp,
which accounts for a telegram to Mrs. Osier stating : ^ saw

DREDS MOTHER YESTERDAY.’

W. O. [writes Futcher] had always been fascinated by Tom Moore’s
poem, ‘ The Lake of the Dismal Swamp % and had always wanted to
visit the lake. Accordingly, he planned a trip for Easter Monday.
We (the Chief and I only) left by boat early for Portsmouth, Virginia,
where we hired a conveyance and drove about five miles across

^ It was at this time that he saw in consultation with the Post Doctor,
a patient, Miss Mabel Tremaine (Mrs. Robert Brewster), which began a
friendship providing many letters for this biography.

524 The Edinburgh Call Apr. -May 1900

country to the Albemarle Canal. After purchasing some cheese,
crackers and fruit at a little country store, we hired the gasoline
launch of the contractor (the canal was then under construction)
for the day. We went along the canal for about two hours and
arrived at the ‘ feeder ’ which is the only outlet of the lake. This
is a deep ditch about fifteen to twenty feet wide and two or three
miles long. The banks are eight to ten feet high and made up of
a rich vegetable humus aeons old. Just before the lake is reached,
there is a small lock which raised us up to the level of the water
in the lake. Passing along this stream for a few hundred yards, we
finally reached the lake, which has no visible banks, the waters of
the lake seeming to merge with the trees of the swamp surrounding
it. The weird cypress trees, with their numerous roots rising out
of the water and merging to form the trunk several feet above the
water’s level, extending far out into the lake, produce the illusion
that the lake has no shores. We motored about the lake in the launch
for about an hour and then started on our return trip. On our way
back, and while we were eating our frugal lunch, the Chief wrote a
most imaginative account of our experiences for Revere on the
blank pages in the back of Burton’s ^ Anatomy of Melancholy ’ which
he had brought along with him. In this he described how we passed
between the roots of the cypress trees ; how brilliant -hued moccasin
snakes had dropped into our boat from the limbs of the trees as we
passed under them ; how we had met a man with a ‘ vertical eye ’ ;
and also of the negroes who had not yet heard of ' Emancipation ’.
We tried to persuade W. O. to publish this amusing tale in St,
Nicholas^ but he never did.^

There was another episode of the Chamberlin Hotel,
one which Futcher does not mention; it concerned a cele-
brated actress of the day named ^ Cissie v/ho having
fallen off the pier one night, conveniently near a passing
rowboat, was immediately fished out, and brought to the
hotel in hysterics. ‘ The Chief’, when subpoenaed by the
manager, said : ^ How fortunate ! We have Dr. Futcher
here ; he is our specialist in drowning, at the Hopkins.
I will send him.’ And from this there grew up a story, more
or less credited, probably attributable to ^ M’Connachie ’,
of how Futcher had plunged into the bay and had swum

^ The original account, written on the fly-leaves of A. R. Shilleto’s 1893
edition of Burton, had long been lost, but the volume has turned up among
those Osier placed in the collection of Burton’s works at Christ Church, with
no expectation that its added contents would ever be deciphered, if indeed
they had not been forgotten. This book has kindly been restored to the
Osier library.

Aet. 50 At the Jacobi Festival 525

an incredible distance to shore, bravely bearing the said
^ Cissie ’ on his shoulder.

On May 4th and 5th pleasant tributes were paid to two
outstanding figures in the profession — one in Baltimore to
Welch on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his doctorate ;
the other in New York to Abraham Jacobi to celebrate his
seventieth birthday.^ That in honour of Welch was largely
a family affair, with a dinner given at the Maiyland Club
and the presentation by Councilman of a Festschrift volume
to which Welch’s Hopkins students and co-workers had
contributed. The Jacobi festival, held the next evening
in New York, was more national in scope, to honour the man
who in 1858, seven years after his escape from Germany as
a young political refugee, had succeeded in making such
a name for himself as a children’s specialist that the first
professorship in paediatrics in the country was established
in order that he might fill the position. Osier’s amusing
remarks at the Welch dinner were not recorded, but his
comparatively serious ones made in New York have been.^
On both occasions E. Y. D. got the better of him. After
a fitting introductory tribute to the guest of honour, he is
quoted as saying :

There is no single question before this nation to-day of greater
importance than how to return to natural methods in the nurture
of infants. The neglect is an old story in Anglo-Saxondom. St.
Augustine, so Bede tells us, wrote to Pope Gregory complaining that
the question of infant feeding was worrying him not a little ! I under-
stand that a systematic effort is being made to supply every child
born in this land its rightful sustenance for one year at least. Under
the auspices of the Pediatric Society and the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union, a Woman^s Infants^ Suckling Union is to be
established, which will strive to make it a criminal offence against

^ For an account of the Welch Festschrift volume and its presentation,
see Maryland Medical Journal^ 1900, xliii 314-19.

The Jacobi Festschrift contained contributions from over fifty distinguished
writers. Among them was Osier’s paper on the subject of ‘ The Visceral
Lesions of the Erythema Group a sequel to the 1895 paper on a similar
dermatological subject, one which interested him greatly, chaotic though
it was — and is. He confessed that ‘ what is needed is a dermatological
Linnaeus to bring order out of the chaos at present existing in the group of
erythemas ’.

^ Maryland Medical Journal, 1900, xliii. 320-2,

526 The Edinburgh Call May—June 1900

the state to bottle-feed any baby, and which will provide in large
and well-equipped sucklingries ample sustenance when a mother
from any cause is unable to do her duty. Dr. Rotch tells me that
the action on the part of the Pediatric Society has been influenced
by an exhaustive collective investigation which has been made on the
future of bottle-fed babies, in which it is clearly shown that intel-
lectual obliquity, moral perversion and special crankiness of all kinds
result directly from the early warp given to the mind of the child
by the gross and unworthy deception to which it is subjected — ■
a deception which extends through many months of the most
plastic period of its life. According to these researches, you can tell
a bottle-fed man at a glance, or rather at a touch. Feel the tip of
hts nose. In all sucklings the physical effects of breast pressure on the
nose are not alone evidenced in the manner set forth so graphically
by Mr. Shandy, but in addition the two cartilages are kept separate
and do not join ; whereas in bottle-fed babies where there is no
pressure on the tip of the nose the cartilages rapidly unite and, in
the adult, present to the finger a single sharp outline, entirely
different from the split bifid condition in the breast-fed child. The
collective investigations demonstrate that all silver democrats, many
populists, and the cranks of all descriptions have been bottle-fed,
and show the characteristic nose-tip. Utopian as this scheme may
appear, and directly suggested, of course, by Plato, who can question
the enormous benefit which would foUow the substitution of suck-
lingries for Walker-Gordon laboratories and other devices !

And in phrases prophetic of his ^ Fixed Period ’ address, he
went on in more serious vein to say :

Mr. Chairman, this magnificent demonstration is a tribute not
less to Dr, Jacobi’s personal worth than to the uniform and con-
sistent character of his professional career. The things which
should do not always accompany old age. The honour, love, obedi-
ence, troops of friends are not for all of us as the shadows lengthen.
Too many, unfortunately, find themselves at seventy nursing a
dwindling faculty of joy amid an alien generation. Fed on other
intellectual food, trained by other rules than those in vogue, they
are too often, as Matthew Arnold describes Empedocles, ^ in ceaseless
opposition’. Against this interstitial decay which insidiously, with
no pace perceived, steals over us, there is but one antiseptic, one
protection — the cultivation and retention of a sense of professional
responsibility. Happiness at three-score years and ten is for the man
who has learned to adjust his mental processes to the changing
conditions of the times. In aU of us senility begins at forty — forty
sharp — sometimes earlier. To obviate the inevitable tendency —
a tendency which ends in intellectual staleness as surely as in bodily
weakness — a man must not live in hij own generation ; he must

Aet 50 Immersed in Bunyan 527

keep fresh by contact with fresh young minds, and ever retain a keen
receptiveness to the ideas of those who follow him. Our dear friend
has been able to do this because he was one

whose even-balanced soul
Business could not make dull nor passion wild.

Who saw life steadily and saw it whole.

During May and June he was pushed to the limit with
consultations, the number of which he found difficult to
restrict, for he was coming to be the doctors’ doctor, and
appeals for advice from his professional fellows when they
or some member of their families were ill were impossible
to refuse; and calls to see people of national promi-
nence could hardly be ignored. Epistolary scraps of early
June, such as this to H. V. Ogden, tell of his summer plans :

Dear O. We are off on the l6th. I am horridly full of work,
& arrears of all sorts stare me in the face. Mrs Osier & Ike have gone
to Boston. We shall stay quietly by the sea after two weeks in
London. We have the same little cottage at Swanage. Love to
your mother. Yours, Wm Osler. The Edinboro chair was a great
tempt, but I am 50 + & the fear of changes perplexes now as it did
not 10 years ago. They cabled the day before the election saying
I could have it if I signified my acceptance. They made a great
mistake in overlooking Bramwell.

In his commonplace-book are jottings which indicate
that on the steamer he immersed himself in Bunyan, whose
^ Life ’ by John Brown he was reading :

Bunyan was 47 when he wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress. Afar off
the Publican stands.’ Said to have been the last work written in
England without any thought of a reviewer — without too any
thought of a reader.

I only thought to make
I knew not what ; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour ; no not I,

I did it mine own self to gratifie.

In the Jerusalem Sinner Saved he says Physicians get neither
name nor fame by pricking of wheals or picking out thistles or by
laying of plasters to the scratch of a pin ; every old woman can do
this. But if they would have a name and a fame, if they will have it
quickly they must, as I said, do some great and desperate cures.
Let them fetch one to life that was dead ; let them recover one to
his wits that w^as mad ; let them make one that was born blind to
see, or let them give ripe wits to a fool ; these are notable cures and

528 Second Summer at Swanage July 1900

he that can do thus — if he doth thus first he shall have the name
and fame he deserves ; he may lie a-bed till noon.’

Taking rooms at 40 Clarges Street, a few weeks were
passed in London engaged in the now familiar round of
activities, including the book shops and auction sales, many
of his purchases being destined to fill gaps in the library of
the Maryland F acuity. Meanwhile he managed to put the
final touches to a promised address.

The name of Jonathan Hutchinson was made familiar to
Osier’s students, for when anything anomalous or peculiar
turned up, ‘ anything upon which the text-books are silent
and the Systems and encyclopaedias are dumb,’ he always
advised them to turn to the volumes of Mr. Hutchinson’s
‘ Archives of Surgery ’. Though of an older generation,
though a surgeon, and though something of a nonconformist
in medicine, at least in the view of the conservative Londoner,
Hutchinson was a man after Osier’s own heart in his humanity
and in his all-roundness. On July 4th there was a gather-
ing of some thousand medical men at the opening of the
‘ Medical Graduates’ College and Polyclinic ’, an institu-
tion which owed its existence largely to Mr. Hutchinson,
who for years before its establishment had given over each
Wednesday afternoon to a widely attended consultation
clinic held at his house for graduate students from any part
of the world who happened to be in London. Osier had been
induced to give an oration appropriate to the occasion,
and chose as his title ‘ The Importance of Post-graduate
Study ’.^ In this address, which contains much that is auto-
biographical, he expresses doubt as to whether the medical
world is as cosmopolitan as it was in the 17th and l8th cen-
turies ; he extols the advantage of graduate studies abroad ;
and in speaking of post-graduate teaching he says :

Post-graduate instruction is needed in all classes among us. The
school for the young practitioner is a general practice in which the
number and variety of cases will enable him at once to put his
methods into daily use. A serious defect may warp his course from
the outset. Our students study too much under the one set of
teachers. In English and American schools they do not move about
enough. At a tender age, four or five years give a man a sense of

^ Lancet, Lond , July 14, 1900, ii. 73-5

Aet 50 Two Types of Practitioners 529

local attachment to place and teachers which is very natural, very
nice, but not always the best thing for him. He goes out with
a strong bias already in his mind and is ready to cry ^ I am of Guy’s
^ I am of Bart’s ’, or ^ I am an Edinburgh man To escape from
these local trammels which may badly handicap a man by" giving
him an arrogant sense of superiority often most manifest when there
is least warrant, is very difficult. I knew three brothers, Edinburgh
men, good fellows at heart and good practitioners, but for them the
science and art of medicine never extended beyond what their old
teachers had taught. A Guy’s man they could just endure, for the
sake, as one of them said, of Bright and Cooper and Addison, but
for men of other schools they entertained a supreme and really
ludicrous contempt. . . .

^ There are \ he said, ^ two great types of practitioners —
the routinist and the rationalist ’ ; and ^ into the clutches
of the demon routine the majority of us ultimately come \

After all, no men among us need refreshment and renovation more
frequently than those who occupy positions in our schools of learning ;
upon none does intellectual staleness more surely steal ^ with velvet
step, unheeded, softly ’, but not the less relentlessly. Dogmatic to a
greater or less degree all successful teaching must be, but year by
year unless watchful this very dogmatism may react upon the teacher
who finds it so much easier to say to-day what he said last year.
After a decade, he may find it less trouble to draw on home supplies
than to go into the open market for wares, perhaps not a whit better,
but just a wee bit fresher. After twenty years, the new, even when
true, startles, too often repels ; after thirty, well, he may be out of
the race, still on the track perhaps, even running hard, but quite
unconscious that the colts have long passed the winning post. . . .

From this he went on to his favourite theme that ^ men
above forty are rarely pioneers, rarely the creators in science
or in literature ’ ; and he cited Harvey’s statement that he
did not think any man above forty had accepted the new
truths regarding the circulation of the blood. He recom-
mended post-graduate study as an antidote against prema-
ture senility, mentioning ^ the three signs by which, in man
or institution, one may recognize old fogeyism And after
telling how graduate students during the last three centuries
had frequented in turn the fountains of learning in Italy,
Holland, Great Britain, France, and Austria, he hinted that
the lines of intellectual progress were veering strongly to the
west. I predict ’, he said, ^ that in the twentieth century

2923.1 M m

530 Second Summer at Swanage July 1900

the young English physicians will find their keenest inspira-
tion in the land of the setting sun.’

On the following day, it may have been while en route to
Norwich, judging from the next letter, he must have finished
the 482 pages of Brown’s ‘ Bunyan ’, for in his note-book
appears ‘ vii. 5. ’00. Good story of Thackeray and his
“ Vanity Fair ” p. 479 ’. And it is a good story. But the
point to be made here in connexion with Osier is that he
was one of the rare people able to write ‘ perlegi ’ at the end
of his books. The following note to J. William White may
have been written before his departure that same morning
of July 5 th ; and it is characteristic that he dated the
annotation just given, and not his letter.

40 Clarges St. [undated].

Dear White, I had an opportunity on Tuesday evening to talk
with MacCormac & the Secretary of the Com. about the Hon.
Fellowship afiair. As there were to be only four they felt that two
could not be selected from one city & Keen was your senior. Evi-
dently the question was very fully discussed & they knew all about
you. I am very sorry. I hope we may see you. We are o£E to Norwich
for a few days & then go on the river for two weeks before taking
to the seaside — Dorset again for a steady rest. Kind regards to your
very very VERY much better half. Yours, W. O.

With his Sir Thomas Browne collection growing apace,
another pilgrimage to Norwich was natural enough, and he
at this time arranged with Sir Peter Eade to have constructed
a dignified receptacle properly inscribed, to hold the skull
of Sir Thomas, which though not exactly ‘ made into a
drinking-bowl’, had nevertheless since 1847 been knocking
about the Infirmary Museum uncared for.^ They subse-

^ This casket, according to an editorial in the British Medical Journal of
February 15, 1902, had been presented by Mr. Williams to the museum in
the name of Professor Osier, who had directed that an appropriate pedestal
should be made on which the casket should permanently stand. The casket,
manufactured by the Goldsmiths’ & Silversmiths’ Company of London, was
described as ‘ an exceedingly choice work of art ’, and the four plates, one
on each side, bore the following inscriptions :

I. ‘ I believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again ; that
our separated dust, after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the
parts of minerals, plants, animals, elements, shall at the voice of God return
into their primitive shapes and join again to make up their primary and
predestinate forms.’

Aet. 51 For Thomas Browne’s Skull 531

quently went to a charming place on the Thames, namely,
Wargrave, at the George and Dragon’, where the Francis
nieces ’ and others joined them, and where Revere had his
first taste and fill of boating. It was a scorching summer
and they were glad by July i8th to get away to the region
of Hardy’s novels and to their cottage on the beautiful
Dorset coast :

^0 Henry M, Hurd from W, O, Swanage, July 20.

I have at last got to the sea and the downs ! After two weeks in
London we went to the or on (as they say) the river which was most
enjoyable. We escaped a good deal of the dining &c. in London.
I have been very busy in the book shops completing my set of Sir
Thomas & found some treasures of Burton and others. We went to
Norwich for a short visit to Sir Peter Eade and I picked up some
interesting photos &c. of places connected with Browne. We have
seen a good deal of Flexner. We went down to Liverpool to see
the two young fellows off — ^they will have told you about the good
time we had. Then we went to Cambridge together & had a most
enjoyable visit. Nuttall is very happy and wUl I think be a per-
manent resident. Everyone likes him so much and he is stirring up
a great deal of enthusiasm. You will have heard I suppose that
Halsted is to be one of the four Americans (Keen, Weir and Warren
the others) to receive the honorary F.R.C.S. at the centenary next
week. I am going as MacCormac has kindly sent us invitations to
all the functions. Jacobs, McCrae and Cushing have been playing
about with us in London. McC. passed his M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P.
last week. He is with me here for a week while Mrs Osier is in Paris
with some friends. ... We had a pleasant evening at the Post-graduate
College. I hope you & the family are enjoying the Blue Ridge.

A few days later he returned to London to attend the
celebration (July 25-27) to which this letter refers — the
centenary of the Royal College of Surgeons ; and in a long
account ^ sent home for local consumption, after giving

2. ‘ At my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for
a monument, history or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my
name to be found anywhere but in the Uni versat Register of God.’

3. ‘ In these moral acceptions the way to be immortal is to dye daily.
Nor can I think I have the true theory of death when I contemplate a skull,
or behold a skeleton, with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us.’

4. This casket was presented to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital by
William Osier, M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University,
1901.

^ Maryland Medical Journal^ 1900, xlii. 520-2.

Mm2

532 Second Summer at Swanage July 1900

the history of the college, and after a description of the
exercises at the Hunterian Museum, he went on to tell of
the conferring of the honorary fellowships on the thirty-four
eminent surgeons from many countries, resplendent in their
varied academic robes — a most delightful ceremony in spite
of the heat And further :

At eight o’clock a dinner was given by the college in the hall of
Lincoln’s Inn, one of the law societies. It was the best-ordered
large dinner I have ever attended. We sat down about 8.15, and
rose about 11.15. A more distinguished company has perhaps never
been gathered to do honour to the profession. To the right of
Sir William MacCormac sat the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of
Salisbury, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Strathcona, Lord
Kelvin and a group of Honorary Fellows. To his left sat the Duke
of Cambridge, Earl Rosebery, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lister,
the Lord Mayor, and other Honorary Fellows. The members of
the council occupied seats at the ends of the eight long tables.
Among many excellent features of a most exceptional dinner may
be mentioned the shortness of the speeches and the softness of the
music. The Prince of Wales spoke with great clearness and direct-
ness, and was well heard by everyone. He acknowledged most
gratefully and gracefully the debt he owed to the President on the
occasion of the serious accident to his knee. The only other speech
of note was by Lord Rosebery, who, witnessing the harmony existing
in the medical profession throughout the world, expressed the hope
that perhaps through science might be realized that peace on earth
to effect which all other means had failed. There were several
remarkable bits of plate on the table — one the silver grace cup
presented to the Barbers’ Company by King Henry VIII in 1540
m commemoration of the union of the barbers with the surgeons.
Pepys mentions this in his Diary : ‘ among other observables at
Chirurgeons’ Hall, we drunk the King’s health out of a gilt cup
given by King Henry VHI to the Company, with bells hanging at it,
which every man is to ring by shaking after he has drunk up the
whole cup.’

He gave in similar fashion a recital of other incidents of the
three-day festival, failing to mention that at the conversazione
given in the College on the Wednesday evening, a couple —
one a dark-complexioned man with a drooping moustache
and mischief in his eye, the other the daughter of Professor
Keen of Philadelphia — ^were loudly announced to the receiv-
ing dignitaries as Dr. and Mrs. Egerton Yorrick Davis.

At Swanage again, there was always an early morning dip.

Aet. 51 Donne’s Biathanatos 533

much play afterwards, and many excursions and picnic-
luncheons on the downs or within the ruined walls of Corfe
Castle. There was a succession of young visitors to enjoy
all this with them, but he and McCrae meanwhile managed
to find time to put together the material for a small mono-
graph (dedicated to the memory of James Elliot Graham)
on a clinical topic they had been studying together.^
During the month, too, as his commonplace-book indicates,
he had been devouring Donne’s ^ Biathanatos ’, from which
he had taken a long list of excerpts that must have coloured
his thoughts, as many of them subsequei^tly did his
addresses. Thus :

p, 22. 4 sets of readers : ‘ Sponges which attract all without

distinguishing ; Houre-glasses which receive and pour out as fast ;
Bagges which only retain the dregges of the spices and let the wine
escape ; and Sives which retain the best only.’

p. 45. Wayside fruit. Some need the counsel of Chrysostom.
^ Depart from the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed
ground, for it is hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep
her fruit till it be ripe.’

p. 73. Sexagenarii were by the laws of wise states precipitated
from a bridge. In Rome men of that age were not admitted to the
suffrage, and they were called Depontani because the way to the
Senate was per pontem and they from age were not permitted to
come hither.

As the following letter indicates, he was compelled to miss
the Xlllth International Medical Congress, which met in
Paris during the week of August 2nd and for which as
Chairman of the American Committee he had taken so much
trouble. A huge assemblage it was, of 6,000 medical men,
with Virchow and Lister the two outstanding figures. To
countless young Americans, Osier’s absence marred the
congress, for it was too large a gathering, and with him as
with no other they would gladly have escaped ; for he

^ A senes of papers reviewing 150 cases of cancer of the stomach had
already appeared under their joint names. The first, in the Phtladelphta
Medical Journal for Feb 3rd, was the report of seven cases which had come
to autopsy and in which the disease had been suspected during life ; interest-
ing to-day chiefly in showing that the X-ray had not as yet come to be used
in detecting lesions of the alimentary canal, and that surgical explorations
were still infrequent. For the second and third papers, see the New Tork
Medical Journal for April 21 and May 19,

534 Second Summer at Swanage Aug.-Oct. 1900

would have known best where to go in order to see old
medical Paris.

To Henry Barton Jacobs from W. 0 . The Gwyle, Swanage,

[no date]

Dear Von J. I had a cable yesterday that my brother was worse,
& I feel that I mnst go out. It does not seem right to leave him at
this crisis. I shall sail by the Teutonic with my brother E. B. and
family, & I hope to be able to get back by the 25th, so as to have
a couple of weeks here. I am desolated to miss the Congress. Greet
the men from me & say how sad I am to miss seeing them — tell the
Keens particularly. Mrs Osier and Ike are well. You must come
here — an ideal spot for air & sea & sand. Yours W. O.

It 'made a sorry break in the summer. In his note-book
he has written : ^ On Teutonic read Fronde, Life of

Bunyan.’ And he probably amused himself aboard ship
with his essay on ^ The American Voice ’ — an article never
completed though he always carried it with him when
crossing, for it is then that changes in intonation strike one
most forcibly. Thus he has jotted down : ‘ Voice. Lucian
says that at Athens he got rid of his barbarous Syrian
speech and perfected himself in a pure Attic diction
See Classics for English Readers. Lucian p. 7.’

From his brother Featherston’s house in Toronto he
wrote to W. S. Thayer :

125 College Street, Saturday.

I came out unexpectedly after a somewhat urgent Cable as to my
brother’s condition. He had had a very bad attack about 10 days
ago but he is now better. I shall probably take the Teutonic Wed-
nesday from N, Y, unless there should be any more serious symptoms
in which case I shall remain & let Mrs Osier & Ike return alone.
The weather here was + + 97° yesterday. I hope you are standing
the wear & tear without losing that eusarkoid aspect which has so
long distinguished you.

As foretold, he was again at sea on the Wednesday, this
time with Fronde’s Life of Erasmus ’ as his companion ;
and from it many excerpts were taken down, such as these :

Advice to students, p. 65 excellent. Read the best of books — the
important thing is not how much you know, but the quality of what
you know — never work at night ; it chills the brain and hurts the
health. Remember above all things that nothing passes away so
rapidly as youth.

Aet. SI The Laennec Society 535

E. P. 79. Do not repent of having married a widow, if you buy
a horse you buy one broken in already. Sir Thomas More said that
if he was to marry a hundred wives he would never take a maid.

He was back in Baltimore by the end of September,^ and
with the opening of the autumn term there was organized
at his suggestion a new society, which was to hold monthly
meetings at the Hopkins. It was called ‘ The Laennec —
a Society for the Study of Tuberculosis the purpose of
which, in his own words, was ‘ to promote the study of the
disease among physicians and surgeons of the hospital, the
senior students of the medical school, and any physicians
who might wish to attend the meetings ’. Believing in the
inspiration of great names, the society had been called after
the greatest student of the disease, and it was planned in the
course of the meetings to review the historical epochs of
tuberculosis ; to study the conditions existing not only in
Baltimore but in the country at large ; and to make reports
upon the work of the hospital in connexion with the disease
during its first decade. It was but one further step of the
many that Osier took in the campaign against the white
plague, and were all of them to be mentioned a volume
devoted to this subj ect alone would be required. This new
society held its first meeting on October 30th, with Osier
presiding, and in the course of his introductory remarks he
said : ^ ‘ Two years ago I was much impressed with the
number of cases applying at our out-patient department,
and some kind friends placed at my disposal a sum of money
which was to be used to promote the study of tuberculosis
and to diffuse among the poor a proper knowledge of how
to guard against the dangers of the disease.’ With no men-
tion that a portion of this sum had come from two ladies
whose sister had died of tuberculosis, and the rest from his
own pocket, he went on to tell how the fund had been
disposed. It will be remembered that a laboratory had

1 It was on Sept. 25th that Jesse Lazear, one of his students on the
Commission and a quondam assistant, died at Quemados, Cuba, of yellow
fever acquired from an infected mosquito which he had allowed to bite him.

* These were published in a special number of the Philadelphia Medical
Journal, devoted to tuberculosis, Dec. i, 1900. This was merely a part
of his propaganda, for he had persuaded the Editor, Dr. George M Gould,
to devote the entire issue to tuberculosis.

536 Beginnings of Social Service Autumn 1900

been equipped, of which C. D. Parfitt had been in charge
until he himself unhappily became a victim of the disease.
Then, also, two of the third-year students — Miss Blanche
Epler during the 1898-9 semester, and Miss Adelaide
Dutcher the next year — had followed the consumptive out-
patients to their homes to investigate the conditions under
which they lived and to see that proper hygienic directions
given in the hospital were actually carried out.^ So at this
first meeting of ‘ The Laennec ’, Miss Dutcher gave a report
on the social and domestic conditions of 190 cases of
pulmonary tuberculosis which had thus been followed up,®

^ ‘ It was in my third year in the medical school [writes Dr. Dutcher] that
I did the house visitation to tuberculous patients of the Johns Hopkins
Dispensary, from October ’99 to October 1900. In the fall of 1899 Dr. Osier
called for a volunteer from the fourth-year class, but without response.
This led me to offer my services and he at once assigned me to the work.
We never had any written communication. Dr. Osier’s verbal instructions
to me were simple and direct. I cannot pretend to repeat his words literally,
but the impression lingering in my mind is as follows : He was of the opinion
that much could be done to prevent the spread of tuberculosis in Baltimore
if the consumptive and his family knew more of the nature of the disease.
He asked me to make a friendly visit, warning me against antagonizing the
patient which naturally would prevent cooperation. My duty should be to
learn all I could about the patient, his family, and his environment ; to
advise him of the nature of his disease, its mode of contagion, and method
of prevention ; to teach him first of all to destroy his sputum because it
contained the seed which caused the disease and was the only way of trans-
mitting the disease to others ; to give him a moral reason for cleanliness to
help him out when natural instincts were lacking ; to give the reason why
sunlight and fresh air were of preventive and curative value ; and to make
any suggestions that would be of help in each home that I went to. I
reported to Dr. Osier once a month at his home throughout the year. In
October 1900, Dr. Osier told me that he and Dr. Welch were about to
organize a society for the study of tuberculosis, and asked me to prepare
a written report of my year’s work to read before the first meeting ’

^ Though the name of ‘ social service ’ was not yet coined, the movement,
in America at least, appears to have had its beginnings in these studies and
reports made by Miss Epler and Miss Dutcher. Osier’s connexion with the
movement, which through Dr. Richard C. Cabot’s work has become one of
the recogmzed extra-mural obligations of all large hospitals, seems to have been
entirely lost sight of. Indeed, he left no stone unturned whereby others might
get the credit of the idea, and his original contribution to it remains obscured.
Subsequently one of the members of the Hopkins class of 1899, Charles P.
Emerson, who succeeded Futcher as director of Osier’s clinical laboratory,
organized a group of students who had a missionary spirit, and they, in
association with the Charity Organization Society, made a study of the

Aet. 51 Is there no Remedy? 537

and Welch in a talk on the bibliography of tuberculosis
made suggestions for the establishment of a special library.
But Osier’s remarks, after all, were the keynote of the
meeting, and in the course of them he said :

If we add the deaths due to tuberculosis of other organs, we are
well within the mark in saying that one-tenth of the deaths in this
city are due to this disease. It is estimated that above a million of
persons are suffering with consumption alone, in this country, of
whom at least 150,000 die annually. The white plague, as Holmes
called it, is the great scourge of the race, killing 5,000,000 yearly.
Let me read you an abstract from De Quincey, which, while express-
ing an old, erroneous idea, gives in his strong and characteristic
language the terrible, the appalling nature of this annual slaughter :
‘ Are you aware, reader, what it is that constitutes the scourge
(physically speaking) of Great Britain and Ireland ? AU readers, who
direct any part of their attention to medical subjects, must know
that it is pulmonary consumption. If you walk through a forest at
certain seasons, you will see what is called a blaze of white paint
upon a certain elite of the trees marked out by the forester as ripe
for the axe. Such a blaze, if the shadowy world could reveal its
futurities, would be seen everywhere distributing its secret badges
of cognizance amongst our youthful men and women, . . . Then
comes the startling question — that pierces the breaking hearts of so
many thousand afflicted relatives — Is there no remedy ? Is there no
palliation of the evil ? ’ Let us be thankful that we can answer
to-day — There is !

During the autumn months, judging from his appoint-
ment books, he was much away on consultations, many of

social and hygienic conditions existing in the homes of the dispensary patients.
Another student, Joseph H. Pratt, who after graduating in 1898 removed to
Boston, subsequently organized at the Massachusetts General Hospital in
July of 1905 a ‘ tuberculosis class ’ in connexion with which a ‘ friendly
visitor ’ was provided. Dr, Pratt appreciates that this was done more or less
unconsciously under Osier’s influence, and states that Osier was among the
first publicly to support him in the development of the class method of
handling these cases. In October of 1905 Dr. Richard Cabot at the same
hospital was the first to employ a full-time, paid ‘ social service ’ worker, and
by his effective writings did much to advance and popularize a conception
of this new kind of hospital service.

Dr. Blanche Epler, the first of these ‘ follow-up workers subsequently at
her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was one of the pioneers in developing
the principle involved, and through the agency of the County Federation
of Women’s Clubs was instrumental in so developing the local public health
activities that they came to receive recognition throughout the country.

538 Beginnings of Social Service Autumn 1900

them family affairs in Toronto. His mother wrote : ^ We
were all up to breakfast with Willie this morning. He saw all
his relatives and administered advice to one and Another.
We shall look anxiously for his report this afternoon [on
^ B. B’s ’ condition] and can but hope it will still be favour-
able.’ But as a relief to these professional duties and
anxieties one may imagine him again in Baltimore on the
late afternoon of Guy Fawkes Day, notice having been
served in strange handwriting both on Revere and on the
little girl some one had named Doris — a notice reading :

‘ Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot ; — ’

and with all the lights out there would be rustling of hidden
conspirators behind curtains, and weird noises to make one’s
flesh creep would issue from the region of the furnace —
all very hair-raising. Or one, in imagination, may hear
a familiar tuneless chant ^ Oh, for Thy many mercies, Gott —
sei — dank I ’, issue from his room, called forth by the receipt
of the book packages containing his purchases of the summer ;
for they were beginning to come in, as the next two letters
show :

^0 John H. Musser. Nov. 7, 1900.

Thanks for your fourth edition, which looks tip-top. I have not
had time yet to more than just look into one or two sections. I do
not see how you have found time to keep it up so thoroughly. I send
you to-day a nice old copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘ Vulgar Errors ’
and ‘ Urn Burial which I picked up for you in London, and which
just arrived in a case the day before yesterday. I was fortunate in
getting some great treasures this summer, and have picked up two or
three very nice things for the College of Physicians’ Library, which
I will send over as soon as a Linacre’s Latin Grammar, which I left
to be bound, arrives. . . .

B. V, Ogden, Nov. 21, 1900.

So glad to hear from you, and to know that the Sir Thomas
pleased you. Greenhill’s edition represents an immense amount of
work on his part. You must come on this winter and spend a couple
of weeks with us. You can have your breakfast in bed, and you will
be perfectly enchanted with my corner in the library now, where
I have gradually collected some great treasures. I have almost
completed the Sir Thomas editions. Do try and arrange it. I am
sure it would do you a great deal of good. . . . The small boy is

Aet.5i In which His Poor are Healed 539

thriving, and whenever I mention you Mrs. Osier says : ^ When can
we get Dr. Ogden to come ? ’ You are one of her special favourites,
I am sending you a paper on Elisha Bartlett, and a talk I gave in
London ; and this week there will be the Locke paper which will,
I think, interest you. Send me word pretty soon that you will be
able to join us. . . ,

On that same day, the 21st, there was a dinner for
J. Collins Warren, who had come from Boston to give ^ Some
Reminiscences of an old New England Surgeon ’ before
the Book and Journal Club of the Maryland ^ Faculty ’ —
a club which had to be kept going ; and, to retrace his steps,
the week before Osier himself for some occasion had been
the guest of the University of Pennsylvania ; and on the
1 2th had talked before the Johns Hopkins Historical Club on
‘ The Sympathetic Powder of Sir Kenelm Digby Nor
was this enough to round off November, for the 28th found
him in Troy, New York, where a local hospital was having
its semi-centenary, and where he gave an address ^ On the
Influence of a Hospital upon the Medical Profession of a
Community This address began with a happy quotation
from Sir Thomas More, regarding the ‘ well appointed
hospitalles ’ in Utopia, which were so well appointed and
attended ^ that, though no man be sent thether against his
will, yet not withstandinge there is no sicke persone in all
the citie, that had not rather lye there, than at home in his
owne house So he went on with well-chosen words, fit
for the ears of trustees as well as staflP, regarding the functions
of a hospital, which in an educated community has a value
that cannot be over-estimated :

It is a’^great pity [he said] that in the administration of this Christ-
like gift we have, in this country, linked sectarian names with any-
thing so sacred. While I know that in Episcopal, Methodist-Episcopal,
Baptist, Presbyterian and other denominational hospitals, much
indiscriminate charity is practised, naturally preference must be
given in them to sufferers who are ‘ of the household of faith ’ which
the institution professes. In nothing should the citizens of a town
take greater pride than in a well established, comfortable Hotel Dieu
— God’s Hostelry — in which His poor are healed. And it should
be to them a personal care. There is to-day far too much of the
second-hand charity of the ten- or fifty-dollar subscription. Let

^ Albany Medical Annals^ 1901, xxii. l-n.

540 Beginnings of Social Service Nov. 1900

me paraphrase the well known words in which Milton describes
the man who consigns his religion to the care of his parson. It is
equally applicable to the man who consigns his charity to the Secre-
tary of a Hospital Board : ‘ A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure
and to his profits, finds charity ” to be a traffic so entangled, and
of so many peddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill
to keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? Fain
he would have the name to be charitable ”, fain would he bear up
with his neighbours in that. What does he, therefore, but resolve
to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor to whose
care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his charit-
able ” affairs, some man of note and estimation that must be. To
this he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his charity, with all
the locks and keys, into his custody.’ ‘ The simple dispensation of
money to be converted into virtue by the piety of other men ’ is as
the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table, ample for Lazarus,
and most acceptable, but of no avail to save Dives. . . .

He touched further on his favourite theme that no
hospital could fulfil its mission that was not a centre for
the instruction of students or doctors ; and he told how
a staff should be organized ; what their relations should
be to the board of government ; that they should make
the best of existing conditions, for ^ some of the greatest
clinicians have had wretched facilities in very small wards :
the little farm well tilled is most profitable He went on to
pay a fine tribute to his colleague Welch and the thorough
organization of his Department of Pathology, adding that
the pathologist should be a well-paid officer of an institution
(all this indirectly to help a former member of his staff,
Dr. George Blumer, then in charge of the Bender Hygienic
Laboratory). Finally in autobiographical vein he continued;

On one other point I may speak plainly as one of the few salaried
attending physicians to a hospital in this country. Look ovei the
organizations of our great corporations — the Railways, the Ware-
houses, the Insurance Offices, the Universities and Colleges — and
you will everywhere find the work to be done upon the good old
principle — ‘ the labourer is worthy of his hire ’. But when we turn
to hospitals we see an enormous staff of men, who ungrudgingly
year by year devote their time and energies to the service of these
institutions ^ without money and without price ’ ; men, too, who
have risen to the very highest distinction and whose hours are bank
notes, and who often devote to the poor, time which should be
given to refreshment and recreation. Think of the long years of

Aet 51 Ungrudgingly Year by Year 541

gratuitous service the late Austin Flint of Buffalo, in Louisville,
in New Orleans and in New York gave to the hospitals of those
cities ; Da Costa, of whom we have been bereft so lately, a hospital
physician, assiduous and devoted for long years, whom death found
‘ on duty ’ ; Weir Mitchell, still in harness at the Infirmary for
Nervous Diseases, still glad to give freely of the treasures of his
ripe and unique experience to whosoever needs them. Tomorrow
morning in some hundreds of institutions, from the General Hospital,
Winnipeg, in the north, to the Charity Hospital of New Orleans
in the south ; from the General Hospital in Halifax, to the Cooper
College Hospital in San Francisco, the public has a band of servants
doing some of the best work in the world, not on business principles.
I do not ask that doctors should always be paid for their services ;
there are many hospitals in which it would be impossible, and there
are wealthy corporations, which should not ask, particularly of young
men, long and arduous duties without remuneration. Hospitals
might fitly recognize this enormous debt by more frequently placing
a physician on the Committee of Management, or on the Board of
Trustees. Fortunately the medical profession can never be wholly
given over to commercialism, and perhaps this work of which we
do so much, and for which we get so little — often not even thanks —
is the best leaven against its corroding influence. While doctors
continue to practise medicine with their hearts as well as with their
heads, so long will there be a heavy balance in their favour in the
Bank of Heaven — not a balance against which we can draw for
bread and butter, or taxes, or house-rent, but without which we
should feel poor indeed.

One thing more must be mentioned in this crowded year,
for it saw buried in Volume III of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital Reports a series of seventeen papers, four of them
from his own pen, comprising the third fasciculus on the
subject of typhoid fever — there having been 829 cases of the
disease in his wards during the ten years since the opening
of the hospital.^ The year had been a trying one. The
world was ridden with pestilence, war, and famine. The
conflict in South Africa was still dragging on, with De Wet,
Botha, dysentery, and typhoid companions-in-arms against
the British. The tragedy of the legations at Peking during
the Boxer Rebellion had horrified the western nations.

^ Some time during that year he must also have prepared for the supple-
mentary volume of Keating’s ‘ Cyclopaedia of the Diseases of Children
Phila., J. B. Lippmcott Co., 1901, two chapters — one on ‘ Sporadic Cretin-
ism ’, and the other on ‘ Cerebrospinal Fever ’ in which the then comparatively
novel procedure of lumbar puncture was fully discussed.

542 Beginnings of Social Service Dec. 1900

Plague, cholera, and famine were stalking through India.
The people had grown indifferent to vaccination and many
outbreaks of smallpox had occurred. Yellow fever was still
having its own way in Cuba. Even in San Francisco plague
had broken out in the unsavoury quarter of its Chinatown.
Mr. Mitchell of Life^ and other antivivisectionists, were
meanwhile abusing those of the profession who alone might
be able to check the horror of pestilence.

A gloomy picture ! But let the last hours of the year and
century be brightened by two letters concerning men who
were quietly working to make the world more habitable.

From S. Weir Mitchell to W, 0 . Sunday, Dec. 31, 1900.

Many thanks my dear Osier for the scholarly address. There is
here what is said to be an original portrait of Locke. I shall be in
Baltimore in Jan. for a day and a night, to talk to the Sheppard Hosp.
Board. A fine chance. Can you take me in for a night ? It will be
not earlier than the 8th Jan. Your Browne books were fine and the
predictions new to me, I bought yesterday a charming pencil original
of Charles Lamb, by Geo. Dance. I wish you and yours a happy
century, and all good gifts of God’s sending or man’s giving. What
a fine fellow is Flexner. I have got him on to snake poisons, and
have planted him full of suggestive ideas, for now I am at the time
when I can sow and let others reap. Yours always and all ways.

From Dr, Walter Reed to Mrs, Reed, Columbia Barracks,

Quemados, Cuba.

11.50 p.m., Dec. 31, 1900.

. . . Only ten minutes of the old century remain. Here have
I been sitting, reading that most wonderful book, ^ La Roche on
Yellow Fever ’, written in 1853. Forty-seven years later it has been
permitted to me and my assistants to lift the impenetrable veil that
has surrounded the causation of this most dreadful pest of humanity
and to put it on a rational and scientific basis. I thank God that this
has been accomplished during the latter days of the old century.
May its cure be wrought in the early days of the new ! The prayer
that has been mine for twenty years, that I might be permitted in
some way or at some time to do something to alleviate human
suffering has been granted ! A thousand Happy New Years ! . , .
Hark, there go the twenty-four buglers in concert, all sounding
‘ Taps ’ for the old year.

CHAPTER XX

1901

THE NATURAL METHOD OF TEACHING

OsLER had other ways of ‘ sanctifying a fee ’ than by the
purchase of rare books to add to his library, and the year
may well begin with a note which shows what a Baltimorean,
professor in another school and long-time treasurer of the
old Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, thought of him. The
note indicates that a renewed effort was being made to lift
the debt which was still burdening the society :

From fhomas A. Ashhy to W. 0 . Jan. 2, 1901.

I think to have a big generous heart and then to have the naeans
of making it happy through generous acts and deeds is the nearest
approach to Heaven we can get in this life. I never saw a man who
enjoyed giving as much as you do, and I presume this is one reason
why you are always happy. If I should outlive you I will make the
old Faculty erect a monument to your memory if I have to give
all the money myself. I rejoice with you in the good work you are
doing and am sure we will have the debt wiped out by the April
meeting. The small donations will come in later. . . .

A New Year’s Day letter to Lafleur, in which he says,
‘ Send me any memoranda of corrections or suggestions you
may have for a new edition of my vade-mecum ’, recalls
that the burdensome triennial text-book revision was due,
but this had to be crowded in among other things. Among
physicians he was one of the first to appreciate the necessity
of immediate operation for intestinal perforation in typhoid,
and to urge that surgeon and physician together visit all
typhoid patients showing symptoms, even suggestive ones,
of this desperate and usually fatal complication. A younger
generation will happily never know what this was all about
and what Osier’s backing meant to the surgeons of that
time. On January 9th he read a paper on the subject
before the Philadelphia County Medical Society ; and
to-day, when the students look upon a stray case of typhoid
as a curiosity, it is merely of historical interest that he

544 Natural Method of Teaching Jan. 1901

should have felt impelled, little more than two decades ago,
to write :

Our senior students should receive a practical, first-hand day-by-
day acquaintance with typhoid fever. Heaven knows there are cases
enough and to spare in every city in the Union to provide instruction
of this sort. But is it given? I do not mean lectures on typhoid
fever, or recitations on typhoid fever. I mean seeing typhoid-fever
patients day by day, practically having charge of them and watching
their progress from week to week. This can be done, and this should
be done in the case of an all-important disease of this character.
The vrorst indictment ever brought against the medical schools of
this country is contained in the recently issued report by Reed,
Vaughan and Shakespeare on the prevalence of typhoid fever during
the Spanish-American War. Shades of W. W. Gerhard and of
Austin Flint ! The young doctors, to whom were entrusted scores
of valuable lives, had practically not got beyond the nosology of Rush.
Of the total number of 20,738 cases of typhoid fever, only about
50 % were diagnosed [correctly] by the regimental or hospital
surgeons.^

Three days later he was in Boston to participate in the
dedication of a new building for the Boston Medical
Library, which explains a characteristically brief note sent
the month before to James R. Chadwick — a note which
merely said : ^ No indeed ! I shall not disappoint you —
only too glad of the opportunity ! It is very good of you
to ask me.^ Since 1875 — since the days, in fact, when
Osier first went down from Montreal to visit Boston —
Chadwick had served in the capacity of a voluntary but
indefatigable Librarian for the Boston Medical Library
Association, a society which holds a relation to the local
profession similar to that held by the College of Physicians
of Philadelphia, the Academy of Medicine in New York,
and the Maryland Medical and Chirurgical Faculty. But
whereas the century-old Maryland Faculty, as T. A.
Ashby’s letter has shown, was vainly soliciting funds in
Baltimore, even to get out of debt, the Boston society in
this its twenty-sixth year had raised a sufficient sum to
erect a palatial building worthy of the man after whom its
chief hall was appropriately named : for Oliver Wendell

^ ‘ On Perforation and Perforative Peritonitis in Typhoid Fever.’ Phila--
delphta Medical Journal, Jan. 19, 1901.

Books and Men

Aet. 51

545

Holmes, after serving thirteen years as its first President, had
then made the library the repository of his books.

At this dedication Osier, John S. Billings, Weir Mitchell,
and H. C. Wood had been invited to speak. Certainly none
of them could have sent a more brief, prompt, or satis-
factory note of acceptance than that quoted above. And
in the course of his address,^ which he entitled ^ Books and
Men evidently with the new edition of his ^ vade-mecum ’
in mind, he told how difficult it was for him to speak of the
value of libraries in terms which would not seem exaggerated;
how they had been his delight for thirty years, as well as
having been of incalculable benefit, and he used the striking
simile, ^ to study the phenomena of disease without books
is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without
patients is not to go to sea at all’.

He went on to speak of the use of a great medical library
for the teacher, for the general practitioner, and finally for
another group to which he belonged :

There is [he said] a third class of men in the profession to whom
books are dearer than to teachers or practitioners — a small, a silent
band, but in reality the leaven of the whole lump. The profane call
them bibliomaniacs, and in truth they are at times irresponsible
and do not always know the difference between meum and tuum.
In the presence of Dr. Billings and of Dr. Chadwick I dare not
further characterize them. Loving books partly for their contents,
partly for the sake of the authors, they not alone keep alive the
sentiment of historical continuity in the profession, but they are the
men who make possible such gatherings as the one we are enjoying
this evening. We need more men of their class, particularly in this
country, where everyone carries in his pocket the tape-measure of
utility. . . .

During this same month there were frequent visits to
Canada because of his brother’s illness, and at home there
was equal cause for anxiety over the ill health of his colleague
Rowland. Meanwhile there were other things to occupy
him, among them a series of evening lectures to be given to
the post-graduates, one of which on Sir Thomas Browne he
promised to give himself. With all this he nevertheless

^ Reprinted in ‘ Aequammitas and other Addresses For a full account
of the proceedings, see Boston Medical and Surgical Journal^ Jan. 17, 1901,
2923.1 N n

546 Natural Method of Teaching jan.-Feb. 1901

managed to write one ^ of a series of articles on The Past
Century : its Progress in Great Subjects which were
published during the month. It was a difficult task, most
successfully handled — a presentation, suited for popular
consumption, of the advances made by Medicine in its
most remarkable century. Of particular interest, possibly,
to the profession, was the section in which the revolution
that had taken place in the treatment of disease was dis-
cussed under the caption of ^ The New School of Medicine ’
— one ^ with firm faith in a few good, well-tried drugs,
little or none in the great mass of medicines now in use ’ —
a new school which cares nothing for homoeopathy, and
less for so-called allopathy, but ^ seeks to study rationally
and scientifically the action of drugs old and new One
paragraph may be quoted :

A third noteworthy feature in modern treatment has been a return
to psychical methods of cure, in faith in something ts suggested

to the patient. After all, faith is the great lever of life. Without
it man can do nothing ; with it, even with a fragment, as a grain of
mustard-seed, all things are possible to him. Faith in us, faith in our
drugs and methods, is the great stock-in-trade of the profession.
In one pan of the balance, put the pharmacopoeias of the world,
all the editions from Dioscorides to the last issue of the United
States Dispensatory ; heap them on the scales as did Euripides his
books in the celebrated contest in the ‘ Frogs ’ ; in the other put
the simple faith with which from the days of the Pharaohs until
now the children of men have swallowed the mixtures these works
describe, and the bulky tomes will kick the beam. It is the avrum
fotahile, the touchstone of success in medicine. As Galen says,
confidence and hope do more than physic — ‘ he cures most in whom
most are confident That strange compound of charlatan and
philosopher, Paracelsus, encouraged his patients ^ to have a good
faith, a strong imagination, and they shall find the effects ’ (Burton).
While we doctors often overlook or are ignorant of our own faith-
cures, we are just a wee bit too sensitive about those performed
outside our ranks. We have never had, and cannot expect to have,
a monopoly in this panacea, which is open to all, free as the sun,
and which may make of everyone in certain cases, as was the Lace-
demonian of Homer’s day, ^ a good physician out of Nature’s grace ’.
Faith in the gods or in the saints cures one, faith in little pills another,
hypnotic suggestion a third, faith in a plain common doctor a fourth.

^ ‘ The Progress of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century.’ The New Tork
Sun^ Jan. 27, 1901 . Reprinted in ^ Aequanimitas and other Addresses ’.

Aet. 5^1 The Faith with which we Work 547

In all ages the prayer of faith has healed the sick, and the mental
attitude of the suppliant seems to be of more consequence than the
powers to which the prayer is addressed. The cures in the temples
of ^sculapius, the miracles of the saints, the remarkable cures of
those noble men the Jesuit missionaries in this country, the modern
miracles at Lourdes and at Ste. Anne de Beaupre in Quebec, and the
wonder-workings of the so-called Christian Scientists, are often
genuine, and must be considered in discussing the foundations of
therapeutics. We physicians use the same power every day. If
a poor lass, paralysed apparently, helpless, bed-ridden for years,
comes to me, having worn out in mind, body and estate a devoted
family ; if she in a few weeks or less by faith in me, and faith alone,
takes up her bed and walks, the saints of old could not have done
more, St, Anne and many others can scarcely to-day do less. We
enjoy, I say, no monopoly in the faith-business. The faith with
which w^’e work, the faith, indeed, which is available to-day in every-
day life, has its limitations. It will not raise the dead ; it will not
put in a new eye in place of a bad one (as it did to an Iroquois Indian
boy for one of the Jesuit fathers), nor will it cure cancer or pneumonia,
or knit a bone ; but in spite of these nineteenth-century restrictions,
such as we find it, faith is a most precious commodity, without which
we should be very badly off.

Osier’s was the last and best of this excellent series of
articles ; but more than this, what concerns us here is the
fact that his honorarium went to the Faculty’s fund, for
his name headed the list with the first and largest con-
tribution, which accounts for the enthusiastic letter from
Dr, Ashby with which the year began.

Britton Bath Osier, great orator and lawyer, whose name
as Crown counsel was a household word in Canada, died
on February 5th — the first loss in the circle which, as the
Canadian papers said, ^ had produced more distinguished
men than any other contemporary family in the Common-
wealth ’ — a man who ^ possessed in large measure that
indescribable gift which goes by the name of personal
magnetism ’* In a letter to his old Montreal friend
Shepherd, Osier in his characteristic, off-hand way, while
expressing sympathy for a loss his friend had sustained,
conceals the anxiety he himself had been under for so
many weeks :

ii.ii.ox.

Dear Shepherd, I am so sorry to hear of the death of your
mother. I knew she was in feeble health but I had not heard of

548 Natural Method of Teaching Feb.-Mar. 1901

anything serious. It will make a sad break in your circle. Give my
kindest regards to your sisters. I have just returned from Toronto.
B. B. went off with coronary artery disease. He has had slow pulse
with syncopal attacks for a year. ’Twas a mercy that he died suddenly
as he dreaded a long illness. So sorry that you cannot come down
for the Surgical association. Love to Cecil.

The year 1901 was a critical one for the Hopkins.
Some liberal citizens had offered the ‘ Homewood ’ property
as a new university site on condition that an endowment
of a million dollars be raised, but there seemed little
prospect of this, for in those days, especially in Baltimore,
this appeared an enormous sum. Mr. Gilman’s resignation,
moreover, had been handed in, and the university was
seeking a new president. Among others, the names of both
Welch and Osier had been mentioned, but they had other
aims in life. Osier’s chief aim was to keep in touch with
undergraduate students, though little may have been said
of them during the recital of these past few years. ‘ Could
you look in here now ’, wrote Mrs. Osier on the evening
of February 23rd, ‘ you would find Dr. Osier at the head
of the dining-room table with 12 clerks of the 4th year
listening to his Saturday evening talk ; and beer, books and
tobacco before them. They all seem to enjoy these even-
ings.’ And yet she wrote the same evening a letter to
Ogden urging him to come ‘ prepared to spend a month
and have a nice loaf ’, adding that ‘ Dr. Osier has felt his
brother’s death very much — the first break among the six
brothers and altogether very sad.’

With these Saturday evenings at home given over to the
successive groups of clinical clerks nothing was allowed to
interfere ; but he was no less punctilious in attending the
local medical meetings, not only at the Hopkins, but those
under the auspices of the Maryland Clinical Society which
met at the Faculty hall. His mere presence was enough
to stimulate an interest in these gatherings, for even if his
name did not appear on the programme he was almost
certain to participate entertainingly in the discussions. Of
his own more formal contributions to one or the other of
these societies it need only be said that they were frequent
and timely, and that several of them early in this particular

Act 51 The Bath Phenomenon 549

year found their way into the pages of a new journal
American Medicine^ which was in need of professional
backing.^ Meanwhile other things were on his conscience
if not actively on his handsj which seemed full enough ; one
of them, the chairmanship of the American Committee to
prepare for the great Tuberculosis Congress to be held
in London that coming summer ; another the text-book
revision.

At this juncture he was laid low with one of his periodic
attacks of bronchitis, and took advantage of his several days
in bed to devour Gomperz’s ^ Greek Thinkers the first
volume of which Scribner had just issued. It was on such
occasions that he managed to do some consecutive reading,
time for which ordinarily was snatched on the wing — when
dressing, breakfasting, or retiring. His nephew, who had
lived at i West Franklin Street or next door with the
latch-keyers ’ during his medical course, has written this
intimate note of W. O.’s bath and the phenomenon
which tells incidentally how time for reading may be
found :

He took a warm bath every evening about 10.30. My room was
next the bathroom at i West Franklin Street and I would get the
bath ready when he called out to me on coming upstairs. Or if
I were downstairs, I always went up with him for the ceremony.
This consisted in my reading to him for ten minutes or so while
he was brushing his teeth, taking his bath and drying himself. In the
course of six years (the seventh I slept at No. 3) we went syste-
matically through several books : Chapman’s Homer Iliad ’ and
^ Odyssey ’), Morley’s ^ Jerome Cardan Izaak Walton’s ^ Lives
Hilton’s ‘ Rest and Pain ’ etc., and — during my anatomy days —
Holden’s ‘ Landmarks ’ (apropos of surface markings, I expect you
have gone swimming with him and seen the hole in one of his shins
from periosteitis following a football injury when he was a boy),
using him as a subject. Sometimes we talked about things in general,
or what I was learning at the time.

In his bath he seldom failed to test what he called the phenomenon
— ^lying flat in the bath with your toes covered with the water, flex
your thigh so as to raise the extended leg sharply out of the water.
You are conscious of no effort until the heel has cleared the water

^ Its first number appeared in April, under the editorship of George M.
Gould, who for sufficient reasons had withdrawn from a similar post on the
Philadelphia Medical JownaL

Aet. 51 Fire and the Phoenix Trick 551

medicine,^ a project not then a matter of public knowledge.
Osier, whose Text-book had been indirectly responsible
for this gathering, had meanwhile returned with Trudeau
to Baltimore for a meeting of the Laennec Society, before
which body Trudeau gave an account of his work in Saranac.
It was in the course of this address that he related the
following incident :

About this time [1893], while ill in New York, my house burned
to the ground, the fire having originated during the night from the
explosion of the kerosene lamp of the thermostat in my litde labora-
tory, and everything in the house and laboratory proved a total loss.
Two days after the fire I received from Dr. Osier a brief note, which
shows that his great reputation should not be limited to his attain-
ments as a physician, but that he may lay claim also to some reputation
as a prophet. The entire substance of the note was as follows :

‘ Dear Trudeau : I am sorry to hear of your misfortune, but,
take my word for it, there is nothing like a fire to make a man do
the Phoenix trick.’

Dr. Osier’s prophecy very soon began to be realized. A friend
and patient of mine, . . . told me that as soon as I was well enough
he hoped I would return to Saranac Lake and build a suitable
laboratory, one that would not burn down ; that he wanted me to
build the best I could plan for the puipose, and that he would pay
for it. . . .

On the heels of one meeting came another : the American
Surgical Association met in Baltimore the first week in
May; on the 13th James G. Mumford came to address
the Historical Club. Two days later there was a meeting
in Chicago ; on the 20th another in Philadelphia ; and on
the 25th the Association of Medical Librarians met in
Baltimore. This society, as may be recalled, had been
launched with Dr. Gould three years before, for the pur-
pose of heartening the group of people, most of them
young women, who were engaging themselves as medical
librarians. This was the first meeting of the society to be
held in Baltimore, where subsequently, with Osier as
President and with Miss Marcia C. Noyes as manager of
its book exchanges, its head-quarters were established ;

^ The Rockefeller Institute was incorporated a month later, on June 14th,
when a pledge of $200,000 was made to the Board (to which the names of
Theobald Smith and Flexner had been added), to be drawn upon at their
discretion during a period of ten years for preliminary work.

552 Natural Method of Teaching May 1901

and it hardly needs saying that Osier made it possible for
the underpaid librarians of both the ‘ Faculty ’ and of the
Hopkins Library regularly to attend the meetings of the
association elsewhere, for in time it came to hold its sessions
in conjunction with the annual A. M. A. gatherings.

But ‘ Association ’ is a large word for the small group of
seven earnest people and a few invited guests who that
afternoon heard Osier give an account of his two visits
made the previous summer to the Hunterian Library at
Glasgow ^ — visits which had left him ‘ bewildered with the
impression of the extent and value of the collection the
uniqueness of which the Glasgow University authorities
scarcely appreciated. And though small, it was a happy
group that later on dined with the Osiers and spent an
evening at i West Franklin Street, which served as a tonic
sufficient to tide them over another twelve months in their
difficult and unremunerative positions.

How he ever found time for his writing is hard to see.
Only two days before this meeting of the librarians, on the
occasion of his visit to Chicago, he had given, before the
Society of Internal Medicine, an important address ® in
which he attempted to tell, as he says, ‘ a plain tale of the
method of teaching at the Johns Hopkins Hospital ’. There
was nothing extraordinary about it, except that in the
third and fourth years the hospital was made the equivalent
of the laboratories of the first and second ; and that the
student learned the practical art of medicine at the bedside.
He spoke of the novel conditions which confronted the
Hopkins teachers at the outset ; gave a skeleton of the
staff organization ; told in detail how the clinical instruc-
tion was begun ; how he believed in the old maxim that
‘ the whole art of medicine lies in observation ’ — and he
dwelt particularly on his favourite third-year observation
class, where the students saw ‘ close at hand the unwashed

^ Bulletin of Association of Medical Librarians^ Balt., 1902, i. 20-3.

2 ‘ The Natural Method of Teaching the Subject of Medicine.’ Journal
of the American Medical Association, June 15, 1901, xxxvi. 1673 The article
was illustrated by several snapshot pictures of the classes, taken by one
of the students. There were many others stolen of him in characteristic
attitudes at the bedside, four of which are here reproduced.

Aet. SI Alpha and Omega of Teaching 553

maladies ’ from the dispensary. He described the class in
physical diagnosis and clinical microscopy, the general
medical clinic, the work of the clinical clerks, his general
clinic in the amphitheatre on Wednesday noon when the
‘ typhoid committee ’ and the ‘ pneumonia committee ’
made their reports. ‘ Great emphasis ’, he said, ‘ is laid
on the teaching of pneumonia, the great acute disease, the
present “ captain of the men of death ”, to use a phrase
of John Bunyan.’

It was all very simple. There was nothing new about
it. This he fully emphasized, quoting in evidence what
Professor Gomperz in his ‘ Greek Thinkers ’ had said of
the rational science of Hippocrates and his contemporaries.
And he ended with this reference to his old teacher :

Years ago my preceptor, Dr. Bovell, placed in my hands Latham’s
‘ Clinical Medicine and he marked a passage which contains the
Alpha and Omega of clinical teaching, and with it I will conclude :

‘ In entering this place,’ speaking of the wards of St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital, ‘ even this vast hospital where there is many a significant
and many a wonderful thing, you shall take me along ivith you,
and I will be your guide. But it is by your own eyes, and your ears
and your own minds and (I may add) your own heart that you must
observe and learn and profit. I can only point to the objects and
say little else than “ see here and see there

Yes, it was all very simple — the method — but there was
something far more important than method — the per-
sonality of the teacher, needed to make this or any other
system a success. One can easily conjecture the existence
of this essential element by reading between the lines of
the address ; but given some years later in the words of one
of those students, it is more vivid :

To us who were his students in the early days of the Johns Hopkins
Medical School, his memory is so vivid, so fresh, that it seems as if
yesterday when he worked and played in our midst, and we have
but to close our eyes to see him in fancy, almost as clearly as we
saw him in fact in the late ’90’s, the great teacher and the great
student in his manifold relations to his students. Now we can see
him riding to the hospital in the Monument Street car, and to the
group about him prophesying with keen yet ever kindly vision the
ills — physical, mental and spiritual of the derelicts en route to the
dispensary ; here in the wards demonstrating the complex psychology

554 Natural Method of Teaching May-june 1901

of Giles de la Tourette’s disease, as exemplified by a poor bit of
sodden humanity whose coprolalia but exemplified — in a way a bit
embarrassing at times, it is true, — the symptom- complex he was
discussing ; or in an alcove off the ward playing with little Theophilia
as she was emerging from the night of cretinism into the day of
normal happy childhood under Hs skilful guidance ; now in the
classroom of the dispensary . . . solving a case of great complexity . . .
now in the clinical laboratory studying a blood specimen, and
suggesting to the student some line of original investigation which
might, perhaps, light into flame the dormant investigator and
research worker ; now in the autopsy room studying in death the
puzzles that he had helped to unravel during life; now walking
through the wards and corridors of the hospital with a smile or an
epigram for every doctor and nurse who passed ; a kindly word,
and his ever-stimulating psychotherapy — encouragement, optimism,
hope — to every patient he saw ; in his myriad activities always
making each student feel that he also was but a student of health and
disease, of men and morals, and yet such a student as to fire our
minds, our souls and our bodies to renewed efforts so that we might,
in some measure at least, prove worthy of this fraternity. To us
who were privileged to be his students — his fellow students in those
days — ^he was, and still is, always our inspiration and always our
model.^

By the end of May, leaving him knee-deep in proofs,
Mrs. Osier had departed, taking Revere for a visit in Canton,
thereby exchanging for her exciting life a very quiet one.
And she wrote to one of the ^ latch-keyers ’ that she was
homesick and blue at the thought of i West Franklin Street
full of people — but that she would struggle along till the
1 5 th. This was the date set for their sailing on the St. Paul^
and, sure enough, by then the Text-book revision was
completed and the pages forwarded to the publishers,
though the preface does not appear to have been written
till after they had reached London. Inserted in his own
library copy of this 4th edition, is a slip on which Osier
has written :

This very clever examination paper on my Text-book was written
by Dr. Scott, afterwards demonstrator of histology m the University
of Oxford, and appeared in the St. Thomas’ Hospital Gazette, 1902.
Additions were made to the original by one or two of my assistants
in Baltimore. About a month after the examination appeared,

^ ^ Osier and the Student.’ T. R. Brown, Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin^
July 1919, xrx. 200.

Aet. 51 On Osier’s Fourth Edition 555

a complete set of answers was sent to me hy my friend J. William
White, the well-known Philadelphia surgeon.

It was a most amusing skit — this paper — and tickled Osier
greatly. It was signed ^ D. M. S.’ and really was composed by
three St. Thomas’s men : L. S. Dudgeon, A. Mavrogordato,
and S. G. Scott. The skit, with its 19 questions (expanded
later to 24) began in this wise :

An Examination Paper on Osler {4th Edition)

There seems to be a certain monotony about medical examinations,
so we suggest the following, by way of variety :

1. — ^Who was Mephibosheth ? What parental superstition dates
from his time ?

2. — ^What is ^ one of the saddest chapters in the history of human
deception ’ ?

3. — Give Osier’s quotations from the following authors : John
Bunyan, Byron, John Cheyne, George Cheyne, Montaigne. Explain
the context where necessary.

The first trace of Osier’s footsteps in London this summer
of 1901 occurs as a note on the fly-leaf of Scott’s ^ Letters
on Demonology and Witchcraft addressed to J. G.
Lockhart, 1830. ^ This is the first Edition ’, he wrote.
^ I bought it at Sotheby’s June 30 1901 for £1. 8. 6. W. O,’
And from the Savile Club he sent word to George Nuttall
that they had changed their plans about Cambridge, since
they were off to Holland on Monday, and would hope to
see him later at the Tuberculosis Congress.

It was again a scorching summer and some one had
suggested that it might be cooler in Holland, where there
were so many windmills. Heat, however, bothered Osier
very little, due, as he was wont to say, to the chill of thirty
Canadian winters lingering in his veins. The trip, long
planned, was to be taken with George Dock, his former
Philadelphia assistant, but at the last moment, braving
the thermometer, Mrs. Osier accompanied them with the
understanding that she was in no way to interfere with
their programme. This was largely a medico-biblio-
historical one, which was to begin with ^ The Anatomy
Lesson ’ at The Hague. They had written ahead to some
physicians in various places they intended to visit, and
started out. Osier with a Life of Boerhaave and Foster’s

Another Summer Abroad

SS6

July 1901

Lane Lectures ^ just published, under his arm. These he
would be found perusing in some corner of the Mauritshuis,
for example, while the others were led on beyond the one
or two pictures to which they had definitely agreed to
confine themselves.

A most amusing though trying day, with the temperature
about loo'^F.jWas spent in Leyden with Professor Rosenstein,
then an old man, a Teuton who for many years had occupied
Boerhaave’s Chair as Professor of Medicine. But alas ! he
had never been to Oud-Poelgeest, nor did he know where
was his immortal predecessor’s tomb — indeed, insisted there
was none. The good old man learned a great deal of medical
history on this particularly red-hot day, and finally got his
guests home, where in their shirt-sleeves, seated on a horse-
hair sofa, they were refreshed by some warm lemonade.
Nor was this all — for a sweltering evening with much
feasting and toasting was passed with the professor’s family
at a waterside resort — but it must suffice. A second day
was passed in Leyden, looking in vain through the university
register for the signature of a quondam matriculant named
Thomas Browne of circa 1633 ; but they had better luck
elsewhere, for later in the day they stumbled upon a sale
at which the belongings of the last female descendant of
Boerhaave were being disposed of, and Osier purchased
items from the collection, including a large brass quadrant
which had once been Boerhaave’s. He also appears to have
made this entry in his pocket note-book late one evening,
possibly on the way back to The Hague : ^

July nth 1901.

Dr. George Dock and I dined with Professor Rosenstein and about
8 o’clock strolled out along the Trekvaart for about half a mile,
then turned into a narrow country lane, which with many windings

^ Osier evidently was pursuing the ‘ flighty purpose viz. to jot down his
impressions for use in a subsequent paper. The plan was never fulfilled. He
did speak on Boerhaave the next autumn before the Historical Club, but his
remarks were never published. Sixteen years passed before he touched this
material again, and then before the Historical Section of the Royal Society
of Medicine (1918) he gave a paper on ‘ Boerhaave’s Position in Science the
manuscript of which is preserved, though it was never printed. In this
article he particularly defends Boerhaave’s position as an experimental
chemist ; ^ Not even the erudite Haeser refers to it, nor indeed does Meyer,

Aet. 52 A Pilgrimage to Oud-Poelgeest 557

led to Oud-Poelgeest (Old Pond Marsh), the country home of
Boerhaave. High stone pillars and massive iron gates of unusual
height open on a drive which leads to the house through an avenue of
magnificent beeches. . . . The trees come very close to the house,
which is a spacious square building of old brick, flanked by wings
which are set forward a little from the main building. Coming out
from the dense avenue it looked as sombre as the ‘ House of Usher
but the weird and solemn stillness was soon broken by the furious
barking of two great dogs, which were kenneled and chained opposite
either corner. A hedge of box, in the letters Oud-Poelgeest, threw
a fragrance on the damp evening air. It was a great deprivation not
to be able to enter the house. On either side there was a dense
shrubbery, in the midst of which to the left stood the magnificent
ruins of what is known as Boerhaave’s tree, an American tulip tree
which he had planted some two hundred years ago. The main
trunk had split some years ago and had been girded with irons ;
one or two of the large branches remained, and there were vigorous
shoots which boie beautiful blossoms. One could not but feel that
the tree was emblematic in a way of the great school of Leyden,
which had as it were lived its life, but which now shows new and
vigorous shoots. A tablet was placed upon the tree in 1817 with an
inscription referiing to Boerhaave and his reputation.

On passing to the back of the house what was our surprise to find
that it rose directly out of the basin or expanded termination of one
of the canals leading directly to Leyden, and Professor Rosens tein
pointed out at one angle the doorway through which tradition says
Boerhaave took his barge to go to town. Here, too, Peter the Great
anchored his boat when he paid a visit to the great Professor. From
the bridge over the canal one got a fine view of the old house, the
foundations of which rose directly from the water. The dampness
of the place may have accounted for the attacks of serious arthritis
from which Boerhaave suffered. Perhaps in his time the place was
more open and the trees had not grown so close to the house ; but
here, after the toils and cares of the day he retired for recreation
and repose. . . .

A few days were passed in Amsterdam — the mornings by
Osier in his shirtsleeves up a ladder selecting from the
shelves of Muller’s magastn de. livres a stock of books for
the ^Faculty’ library and incidentally some few for his
own. On a table conveniently near for consultation stood
the volumes of the Index Catalogue of the Surgeon-

while Garrison, so accurate and liberal, is positively unjust and is supported
by my Cambridge brother [Allbutt] whose astonishing statement is quoted —
“ he made no experiments in Medicine

Another Summer Abroad

558

July 1901

General’s Library, and Foster’s new ‘ History of Physiology ’
lay open exposing the page with a chronological list of rare
historical works; — a pitcher of drinking-water completes
the picture. Meanwhile Mrs. Osier writes to one of the
‘ latch-keyers ’ in Baltimore that her two men are very
happy hunting old books ; and incidentally a fifty-second
birthday is recorded :

. . . They found nothing in the Hague or Rotterdam, but have
had splendid luck here and got some Boerhaave things in Leyden.
We are going north to-morrow to Groningen ; then to Utrecht and
Antwerp — on to Ghent and some epileptic-hospital place ; and
cross from Ostend on the 21st. . . . Revere is so happy in Scotland.
He joked up to the last moment about leaving us, but when we put
him on the train he said ; ‘ Oh, I do care — I feel queer in my heart
under my arm.’ . . . Dr. Osier has been really sightseeing on this tiip
and is very amusing. He looks at one picture in the collection and
then flies to a book shop. I got him a lovely Keats for his birthday.
I think I told you he would not bid against Quaritch at this sale
so we had to take it at his price, but no matter, he is so happy over it.
He has a consultation in the country next week and the fee will
cover many indiscretions.

From Amsterdam they crossed the Zuyder Zee to visit
the new clinics in course of erection at Groningen, and
there a lifelong friendship was started with K. F. Wencke-
bach, the newly appointed young professor, who vividly
recalls one incident of the visit, for after they had gone
over the buildings Osier announced that he would like to
see ‘ the Bible ’. ‘ What Bible ? ’ ‘ The Bible ’, replied

Osier, ‘ that belonged to Martin Luther and afterwards
came into the hands of Erasmus who made annotations in
it ; it must be in the University Library.’ ‘ And lo ’,
Professor Wenckebach adds, ‘ there the Holy thing was ’ —
much to his amazement, for he knew nothing about it.
They subsequently went on to Friesland, and that enchant-
ing spot Leeuwarden ; and from there the stoiy may be
taken up from another letter, written by the third member
of the party :

... I believe I wrote you from Amsterdam. We really had a
delightful trip, though Drs. Dock and Osier became utteily dis-
gusted at every place where old books were not forthcoming and
promptly wanted to leave. We went far north into Friesland and

Aet.sz No one to Poke 559

came to a most fascinating place, Leeuwarden, 'where we had the
good luck to hit on a kermess and saw the natives in their charming
prospeiity and beauty. There also we found the factory for ^ antique ’
silver — and know why it is so plentiful. The spoons cost almost
nothing there. Utrecht was a great disappointment. The Professor
wrote Dr. Osier a note and called him ‘ dear Professor Hopkins ’
which afforded us much amusement. In Antwerp it was so boiling
hot we could not breathe and made up our minds to skip Bruges
and Ghent and rush on to Ostend. There we stayed three days in
a most charming hotel and had sea baths and geneially refreshed
ourselves. . . .

So they did, and some one else tells that the ^ Life of
Boerhaave ^ was forgotten, and a peculiar amphibious dark-
skinned person who had learned his water-tricks in the
ponds of Upper Canada proceeded to walk around the floor
of the ocean on his hands, waving aloft a pair of legs to the
amazement of the natives and to the anticipated embarrass-
ment of his wife in the water alongside. F rom this digression
we may return to Mrs. Osier’s letter :

[From Ostend] we went back to Clarges Stieet. I stayed two
days at the Congress. It was very impressive — the Duke of Cam-
bridge opened it. I nearly had a fit. I did not know Dr. Osier was
to speak and I was overcome with astonishment. Entre nous — he
and Lord Lister had more applause and a better greeting than any
of the others. The thermometer was about 98° and I was so excited
I really could hardly sit still. I was alone and had no one to
poke. The meetings were most successful and the social functions
wonderful. I asked Mother to send you on a menu from Sir James
Blyth’s dinner, . . . The Duke of Cambridge asked Dr. Osier to sit
down and chat with him, and said : ^ Oh, you Americans are so
joky, I do hhe you.’ Wasn’t it delightful. We went to a most
lovely tea at Apsley House — there the Duchess of Wellington made
us feel that we were really the only people in the woild she wanted
to see. It gave me a good lesson. I left the men having this veiy
festive time, and came to Edinburgh by sleeping-carriage — then on
to Falkirk.

She had gone to Scotland to get Revere, who by this
time was probably feeling less ‘ queer in his heart under his
arm leaving behind her in London Drs. Dock, Musser,
and Osier ^ tuberculously daft % as she expresses it in another
letter. But this British Congress on Tuberculosis, the second
of these special congresses to be held on an international
basis, which opened on Monday, July 22nd, with some 2,500

Another Summer Abroad

560

July 1901

persons in attendance, cannot be so lightly dismissed. It
was indeed a most successful affair, and royalty by lending
its patronage had lined itself up in the campaign against
the disease which had spared no families, those of prince
or pauper. A short six months to the day had elapsed
since the cousin of the Duke of Cambridge — who eighty-
three years before had unexpectedly stepped between him
and the throne — had ended her long career. Otherwise
she, rather than her son, would have been the person to
command the aged Duke, who had served in the Crimea
when Osier was wearing a smock-frock in Bond Head, Upper
Canada, to be temporary G.O.C. in this new and peculiar
campaign which was to be fought by a species of propaganda.

The exciting occasion — when there was no one for
Mrs. Osier to poke — was the opening ceremony at St. James’s
Hall when, in the presence of Ambassadors innumerable,
Mr. Choate among them, of Strathcona the High Com-
missioner of Canada, of Bishops, Lord Mayors, Earls,
Marquises, and other dignitaries too many to mention,
the Earl of Derby called upon the representative delegates
of each of the foreign countries — Osier first, as representing
America — and in turn presented them to the Duke. Osier
spoke briefly, and the reader knows how it was that he came
to apply Bunyan’s phrase in speaking of consumption as
‘ captain of the men of death ’ ; the captain, he said, had
nevertheless been reduced to a lieutenant and would soon
be reduced to the ranks, though it was almost too much to
expect that he would actually be drummed completely out
of the regiment. All of which may have been what H.R.H.
the Duke termed ‘joky In alphabetical order, the Belgian,
Danish, French, German, and other delegates were then
presented, each of them responding in turn with appro-
priate and brief remarks — less ‘ joky ’, be it said, than were
Osier’s. A deputation. Osier among them, was subsequently
received by the King at Marlborough House ; and there
were great receptions, one at the Mansion House, and
elaborate dinners to be attended.

During the serious sessions of the congress which followed,
the outstanding, and, be it said, somewhat disconcerting,
episode occurred on the second day, when, introduced

Aet. 32 Tuberculosis: Human and Bovine 561

by Lord Lister, ‘ Geb. Med. Rath. Professor Dr. Robert
Koch, Direktor des Instituts fur Infektionskrankheiten in
Berlin ’, discoverer of the tubercle bacillus, gave a notable
address,^ a certain portion of which provoked most unex-
pected commotion. Koch gave an exceedingly interesting
analysis of the ways in which different infectious diseases
must be combated, and laid down a most sensible pro-
gramme for the fight against tuberculosis. Much of the
value of this was lost, however, because of the one section
of his paper in which he dwelt on the difference between
human and bovine tuberculosis. For what riveted the
attention of his audience to the exclusion of all else was his
statement that human tuberculosis was practically non-
transmissible to animals ; that the reverse was probably
also true ; and consequently that the attempt by legislative
action, particularly rigorous in England, to stamp out the
disease in cattle as a source of human infection, had been
misdirected. This led to a storm of protest and disagree-
ment among sanitarians, which lies outside this story.
Sufiice it to say that Koch again, as with his tuberculin,
had been a little premature in his conclusions ; and in the
discussion that immediately followed the address. Lister
with extreme clearness of thought promptly put his finger
on the weak point in the deductions Koch had drawn from
his experiments.^

^ ‘ The Fight Against Tuberculosis ’ British Medical Journal^ July 27,
1901,1! 189-93.

^ In these experiments Koch had shown that it was impossible to infect
cattle, swine, or other animals with the bacillus taken from cases of pul-
monary consumption in man, whereas they were readily susceptible to
transmission of infected material from animal to animal The reverse experi-
ment, of course, could not be tried without personal ‘ sanction ’ of a group
of human volunteers. However, involuntarily, experiments are continually
being conducted, particularly in the case of children who are fed on butter
and milk containing living bacilli from infected animals. Koch did not
believe tuberculosis could be contracted by humans in this way. Others who
disagreed with him were apparently correct, but his, just then, was the greater
voice. The aftermath of all this can be followed in the correspondence,
editorials, &c., in the British Medical Journal of July 27, 1901, and succeeding
issues. It may be said that a Royal Commission on Tuberculosis was soon
appointed which sat for ten years, with a net expenditure of
published an elaborate report m 1911, to the effect that man is mfectible by
the bovine bacillus, Professor Koch notwithstanding

562 Another Summer Abroad july-Aug. 1901

There was one man greatly missed at the congress, and
in the midst of the three days’ busy sessions Osier found
time to say so in a letter of July 23rd to Dr. Lawrason Brown
at Saranac :

40 Clarges Street.

Dear Brown, You will not find it easy I fear to get an assistant
unless he is a healed lunger h I do not know of the right naan at
the moment but I will bear it in mind. We are having a delightful
meeting, only we miss Trudeau sadly. So many inquire for him
& speak of his work. So glad you are going to take charge of the
Sanitarium. The outlook for you should be first-class. Love to
Di Trudeau.

A meeting of the British Medical Association at Chelten-
ham followed upon the heels of the Tuberculosis Congress,
and though Osier was in attendance and participated in
the programme, the occasion need not detain us except to
point out that, as told by G. A. Gibson,^ he seems to have
devoted himself largely to his old friend Sir William
Gairdner, whom he was to see for the last time. This
meeting over, he rejoined Mrs. Osier and Revere at North
Berwick, where they had meanwhile gone and where rooms
had been taken for the remainder of the summer near his
friends the Schafers, who resided there. A few days later
he wrote to John H. Musser, saying :

We were very much disappointed that you did not turn up on
Tuesday. I only found out the Sabbatarian character of the North
British RR in the afternoon. It was very nice to see you in London.
I only wish that you had come earlier as there were many things
that we might have done together. It has been delightful I feel
sure for John to have trotted about with you. Mrs. Osier sends
love Sc thanks for the books. . . . This is a delightful place Sc I shall
enjoy the golf greatly. I hope you will have a good trip. Kind
regards to Janeway. It was nice to have him here as one of our
representatives. Do not forget to tell the Provost w^hat a strong
impression Ravenel made. He appeared before the Local Gov.
Board on the tuberculosis question.

In North Berwick he feigned to devote himself to the
links, but there are recollections of a succession of visitors ;
of expeditions to Bass Rock, which William Harvey visited
with amazement in 1633, as described in his treatise on

^ ‘ Life of Sir William Tennant Gairdner ’. Glasgow, 1912,

Aet. 52 The Links at North Berwick 563

The Generation of Living Creatures ’ ; of Tantallon
Castle and Berwick Law, from which one can see on a
fine day Arthur’s Seat and the smoke of Edinburgh, some
twenty-five miles up the Firth of Forth. Nor was Edin-
burgh so far away but that expeditions were made there
too, as verified by the note, ^ I bought these volumes in
Edinburgh Aug. 1901 written in such a peculiar set as
William Hayley’s ^ Essay on Old Maids ’ in three volumes.
And likely enough there were purchases for the Faculty, to
whose Librarian, Miss Marcia Noyes, he sent a belated note :

Dear Miss Noyes, I was very distressed (truly) to leave without
saying good-bye but I had such hard work to get away — that con-
founded text-book kept me right to the very last moment. I hope
by this time you are away on your holiday. I will send by Sept ist
the circular letter which I wish to have sent to all those interested
in Libraries asking them to subscribe. I have some treasures for the
Library. ^ Muller & Co of Amsterdam had a loft full of fine old
books which I looked over. They will send out a box about Sept. 1 5th.
Let me know’ if there is anything special wanted from Germany as
it could come in Muller’s box. We had a delightful trip in Holland
We came here ten days ago. I have forgotten all about medicine
8 c Doctors Sc my sole ambition in life now is to reduce my score at
golf. I hope your sister keeps well.

Nor had he forgotten the McGill Library, for a few days
later a similar letter went to its supervisor. Miss Margaret
Charlton, announcing some rare books he was sending, and
later on he wrote to the son of his old preceptor, who
had graduated from McGill the previous spring, and with
whose plans he was naturally concerned, saying :

Incheuen, North Berwick,
Aug. 2ist 1901.

Dear Campbell, I am delighted to think that you will be in the
M. G. H. on Sept ist. How long is your service, i or i 1/2 years?
I think if you wish it I could arrange to take you on my service
next year (after finishing the M. G. H.). You could come in as one
of the four senior Residents and the work would be mainly bacteiio-
logical but you would see all the work and have to help in teaching.
If you think of it as likely, pay special attention to bacteriology this
winter with [John] McCrae your Resident Pathologist — in fact it
would be well to get him to coach you. Of course if you think two
years of Hospital work too much, with what you wish to spend
abroad, it might be possible to arrange for some special w^ork, but

002

564 Natural Method of Teaching Sept.-Oct. 1901

you would not have the advantage of living in the Hospital. Aunt
Grace and Revere send love. We sail Sept. 14th.

And this allusion to Palmer Howard and to days gone by
makes it appropriate to recall the Rev. W. A. Johnson, and his
son ‘ Jimmie who had helped grind the cow’s molar ; and
who, having long since left medicine to enter the Church,
now had a parish near London :

To James Bovell Johnson from W. 0 . U.S.M.S. St. Louts,

1 8 th.

Dear Jim, We had to change our plans & did not leave North
Berwick until nearly a week later than we had anticipated. I am so
sorry to hear that you have had financial troubles, & am sure your
suspicions must be unfounded. ... X. has done well but I am afraid
he has not saved much money. You know how hard it is to put
by anything in our profession unless you are keen after the ‘ baubees ’
and successful in investments. I worked 20 years before I had saved
a shilling. I doubt if I shall be over next year as I have a lot of
heavy literary work on hand. Let me know if I could help you in
any way. . . .

On the steamer he was probably kept busy between
Revere and ‘ The American Voice ’, but he found time to
write — or to promise, for he procrastinated about this —
a review of Sir Michael Foster’s ‘ Lane Lectures ’, which,
as noted, had trotted about with him during the summer.
On landing, they paid a brief visit to the Conynghams in
Wilkesbarre, and to judge from a series of letters to
Mr. George Coy, the idea must have struck him of the
desirability of publishing in the School Catalogue a list
of the former graduates with the positions they had come
to occupy, as well as a list of the papers written hy members
of the staff. At least, from this time on, such a list became
a feature of the Medical School Catalogue. These letters
show also that the health of the students, many of whom
were living in unsanitary boarding-houses, was a source of
unending anxiety, which fell even more heavily on him
than on the Dean, for the Professor of Medicine had to
care for them and take the blame. In a later paper ^ he
mentions the case of one of the third-year students, a
Baltimore boy, who, used up by his June examinations, had

1 ‘ Typhoid Fever and Tuberculosis ’ American Medtctne, Dec. 26, 1903.

Aet. 52 A Hamiltonian Terrier 565

been admitted to the hospital with fever, and for a time
typhoid instead of tuberculosis was suspected, for which
both he and Thayer were severely censured by the family.
The death of Davis while a house officer had been the
occasion of immeasurable distress, and first and last there
had been a good deal of illness. In the class of 1899 alone
four of the students had developed consumption, and at
this particular time John Bruce MacCallum, possibly the
most brilliant student ever graduated from the school, had
begun to show while at work in Mall’s laboratory unmis-
takable signs of the disease, which ended in four short years
a career of unusual promise.

Thayer had married during the summer, and T. B.
Butcher with another had come as neighbours to share
his place in the 3 West Franklin Street house with H. B.
Jacobs. Then, too, the circle had been further increased
by the arrival for Revere of a black puppy, designed to be
a long-haired spaniel and selected with due regard for his
pedigree by Dr. Malloch of Hamilton. Revere at that time
was having a severe attack of mythology and could think of
little else. The puppy consequently was promptly named
‘ Hector ’, which must have considerably modified his
destiny, for he turned out to be more of a Trojan and less
of a spaniel than was expected (W. O.’s diagnosis was a
Hamiltonian terrier). At about this time, also, the foreign
book packages began to come in, and, to judge from the follow-
ing letters, were being distributed, George Cheyne’s ‘ Essay
of Health and Long Life ’ accompanying the first letter :

To George C. Shattuck ftoni W. 0 . 1 West Franklin Street.

I am sure you will enjoy reading the old man’s book on Health.
There are some very delightful things in it. I am glad to see that
you sign yourself only George C. Perhaps we might compromise
on that, but I dare say as you glow oldei & get well into the
piofession & appreciate the virtues of the oiigmal George Cheyne
& of your great-grandfather & grandfather you will then insensibly
be compelled to use the Cheyne for the Cheever. With kind regards
for all at home, &c.

To F. J. Shepherd from W. 0 . 2.18.01.

Very glad to have your letter this evening. We got back three
weeks ago. Mrs. O & Revere have just returned from Canada.

566 Natural Method of Teaching Oct.-Nov. 1901

I could not go with them as there were a scoie of things to do befoie
the session opened Sc we were arranging a new scheme for our 4th
year work by which the men would have more time in Medicine
Sc Surgery and bunching the specialties to practical demonstrations
Sc work in the Dispensaries. ... I have been book hunting all summer
and secured some treasures in Holland, chiefly from Muller of
Amsterdam who keeps a good stock. I sent out one or two books
for the Library Sc I got in London a good copy of Harvey’s De geneia-
tione Animalium, Eng Edition, which I left to have bound Sc for-
warded. All goes well here, except that I am bothered to death
with practice — hard to keep it within decent limits so as to have
time for teaching Sc private work. What is the Date of the C M A ?
If it is after the middle of Sept I can be with you Sc would be only
too glad to give the Address in Medicine or anything else you wish.
So glad that you are the President this year. Love to Cecil and
Doiothy. I hope you will be down this winter, Sc bring Cecil.
I saw Stephen Mackenzie several times — he is better but looks far
from well. I have been reading with interest Macallum’s Addresses
— they bring back old days Sc ways. What a shame that we never
had his portrait painted. Is it too late? Wright’s too? Yours ever

OSLER,

From October 21st to 23rd there was a gathering at New
Haven to celebrate the bicentenary of Yale — an occasion
which brought together delegates from countless universities
at home and abroad, as is the way with such festivals. The
exercises culminated in a ceremony remarkable in many
respects, but particularly in that it gave opportunity to
bring out the extraordinary qualities of two very unusual
personages — Hadley, then President of Yale; and the man
whom fate a short time before had made President of the
Nation. Some threescore men of letters, of science, and
statesmanship from various parts of the world were pre-
sented for degrees — John Hay, Marquis Ito and so on;
from the Johns Hopkins were Remsen, Gildersleeve, and
Osier; and, youngest of all, the Professor of Jurisprudence
and Politics at Princeton University, by the name of
Woodrow Wilson, to mention but a few of them. To
each of these sixty as they were presented in turn, without
reference to any notes, Mr. Hadley addressed himself ap-
propriately and briefly in conferring the honorary degrees —
the last of them on a man to whom, as a private citizen
a few short months befoie, the invitation had been sent.

Aet. 52 Arranging a Programme 567

Turning to Theodore Roosevelt^ he said : ^ But one name
now remains ^ whereupon an extraordinarily moving scene
was enacted — which perhaps, after all, lies outside this
narrative.

To Ftancts R, Packaid from W, 0 . Nov. 2, 1901.

Pardon the delay in replying to your lettei, but I have been on
the load. Yes, I will come over with pleasure on the 13th, and will
gladly dine wdth you at the club and stop the night. I am so glad
to hear that you have started a historical club. It will be most
useful. I am arranging a programme for our Book & Journal Club
for this winter. Could you give us something at one of the meet-
ings ? It is a club of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty, with about
sixty or seventy members, and we have four meetings a year, at
which we generally have somebody from outside to give us a little
talk on any matters of bibliographical or historical interest. If you
can come would December i8th^ be convenient?

November 9th records a dinner at i West Franklin Street
in honour of the King’s birthday. The 19th finds him in
Elkton, the home of his country-doctor friend Ellis, in
attendance at the autumn meeting of the Faculty. The
month also saw published a number of brief clinical papers,^

^ Packard did come, and spoke on the Resurrectionists [i.e, body-
snatchers] of London and Edinburgh ; while on the same programme Osier
was down for a paper (unpublished) entitled ‘Pickings from London
Book Shops He presented a number of the ‘ pickings ’ to the Faculty
Library.

^ Two of them are especially noteworthy. One was his first paper (three
others followed) on ‘ Multiple Hereditary Telangiectases [&c.] ’ (Johns
Hopktns Hospital Bulletin, 1901, xii. 333-7).

The other bears the paradoxical title of ‘ The Advantages of a Trace of
Albumin and a Few Tube Casts m the Urine of Certain Men over Fifty Years
of Age ’ (New Tork Medical Journal, Nov 23, 1901), m which he belittled
the chance laboratory-finding of a tiace of albumin and a few tube casts. He
pictured the successful business man, who having overstoked his engine has
a rude shock when some life-insurance company declines the extra sum he
wishes to place on his life. He proceeded to give a few striking illustrations,
one of them, Osier subsequently admitted, being the case of Sir Charles
Tupper — then ‘ still alive and an octogenarian of exceptional vigour \ And
he went on to tell of the man who in the Cathedral of Antwerp, the past
summer, had touched him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear, ‘ Not
dead yet and on turning he had seen an old patient who ten years before
had been rejected because of Bright’s disease. Sir Charles Tupper, who,
before Strathcona, had been Canadian High Commissioner, lived to be
ninety-three ; and in an obituary notice which Osier wrote of him (British

568 Natural Method of Teaching Dec. 1901

and the appearance of a large volume on typhoid fever of
which he was the editor.^ So the time was amply filled both
at home and ^ on the road In December he is found at
a meeting in Ann Arbor, where he addressed the students ;
and, later on, the Christmas recess was passed with Mrs.
Osier’s relatives. Some time before, he had sent this
undated note to his friend Chadwick in Boston :

You are a Saint. That dictionary ^ ^A-ill be of such help — I have
long wanted just such a volume. Le Peter is most flatulent & will
please some of the boys. Thank you so much for both of them.
The 27th or 28th would suit me for a talk — Thomas Linacre, the
fiist of the Great Medical Humanists. If this is too long just Thomas
Linacre. Yours sincerely. [P.S.] I will bring the volumes as a text.

Thus the Boston Medical Library, and a sort of book and
journal club which had been started there by Chadwick,
profited by this Christmas visit ; and though he chose
Linacre as his topic, several years were to pass before this
material was whipped into its final form as a finished essay.

Medical Journaly Nov. 6 , 1915) he returns to the subject, saying: ‘The
advantage of the discovery [made in 1880 in Sir Charles’s case] was never
better illustrated, as he ever after lived a careful life.’

^ Under the supervision of Dr. Alfred Stengel, a successor to Osier’s
former position in Philadelphia, a translation from the German, of Nothna-
gel’s great ‘ Encyclopaedia of Practical Medicine ’ had been made during the
year. The volume on Typhoid and Typhus Fevers was edited by Osier with
the help of Dr Rufus I. Cole, then one of his assistant resident physicians,
and judging from Osier’s preface many of the chapters in the volume of over
600 pages had been thoroughly revised or practically rewritten.

^ Cappelli’s excellent ‘ Dizionario di Alpbrevia ture latine ’, Milan, 1 899

CHAPTER XXI

1902

BOOKS AND THE MAN

During the year the subject of tuberculosis continued
to be very much to the fore, and the community at large
had begun to be sufficiently aroused to appreciate the
significance of an anti-spitting ordinance, if nothing more.
Nor was the public allowed any rest at this stage of
its education. On January 13th Osier wrote to the Dean :
‘ I think a very good subject for an evening lecture
would be Municipal Sanatoria in Tuberculosis ; Dr. Warren
Buckler has the whole matter in hand.’ The time had come,
indeed, when an assault on the Statelegislature was justified,
and with this both Welch and Osier in their diffeient spheres
had much to do.

The local Board of Health, of which Welch continued to
be President, and which had a most active Secretary in the
person of Dr. John S. Fulton, had recommended through
the Governor to the legislature the appointment of a Tuber-
culosis Commission which, though unsalaried and removed
from politics, was, however, to be granted certain powers. In
order to secure some popular backing for this recommenda-
tion, it was decided that a public meeting should be held
under the combined auspices of the Laennec Society, the
Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, and the Maryland Public
Health Association. This last-mentioned body, of whose
origin rnention has been made, had in the short four years
of its existence come to play an increasingly important role in
turning public attention towards matters of public health.

In these matters, particularly as regards tuberculosis,
Massachusetts was far ahead of the other States, and
Dr. Vincent Y. Bowditch had been asked to come from
Boston to give the main address of the evening. McCoy
Hall was packed to the doors. Dr. Fulton, in explaining
the status of the tuberculosis question so far as it con-
cerned the welfare of Baltimore and the State, vividly laid
bare the ‘ignorance, vice and greed which propagate the

Books and the Man

570

Jan. 1902

disease Bowditch followed with his address, which began
with a quotation from Osier’s ^ Practice and ended with
a plea for a state sanatorium for Maryland. The Mayor of
Baltimore made a few feeble remarks. And then Osier w^as
called on. The situation may be contrasted with that of the
summer before, when royalty had aligned itself with the
crusade and he spoke in the presence of the old Duke of
Cambridge on the same subject. The rather-more-than-
usually apathetic Mayor found Osier distinctly less ^ joky ’
than had the Duke — indeed, to the amazement of Balti-
more, Osier publicly shook his finger in the Mayor’s face —
but apparently it turned the trick. He was quoted, in a mild
version, as having spoken impromptu, as follows : ^

Mr. Chairman and my long-suffeiing, patient, inert fellow-
citizens : You have heard two aspects of the tuberculosis question
— first, the interesting statement, with reference to the existing
prevalence of the disease, from Dr. Fulton ; and second, the modern
means whereby the disease in a very considerable number of cases
may be arrested. Now, what is our condition in this city, and what
are we doing for the 10,000 consumptives who are living to-day in
our midst ? We are doing, Mr. Mayor and fellow- citizens, not one
solitary thing that a modern civilized community should do. Through
the kindness of a couple of ladies — God bless them ! — I have been
enabled in the past three or four years to have two medical students
of the Johns Hopkins University visit every case of pulmonary con-
sumption that has applied for admission to the dispensary of our
hospital, and I tell you now that the story those students brought
back is a disgrace to us as a city of 500,000 inhabitants. It is a story
of dire desolation, want, and helplessness, and of hopeless imbecility
in everything that should be in our civic relation to the care of this
disease. No instruction on the part of the State or city, none what-
ever, These people have had no instiuction except what these two
young women have given them. . . .

This is the whole matter in a nutshell, Mr. Mayor and fellow-
citizens. Now, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. It
is not the fault of the Mayor and City Council, but of the citizens,
and unless you get them awake nothing can be done If you can
once get the people awake it doesn’t make any difference if the
Mayor and City Council are asleep. It is you, fellow- citizens, that
must wake up, and if you would get wide awake, and remain awake
a short time, I would like to tell you what to do.

Mr. Mayor, you may close your ears, because I know you are

^ Maryland Medical Journal^ 1902, xlv. 133-5.

Aet.s2 ‘You, Mr. Mayor’ 571

a good hard-working fellow, and don’t get your deserts. But . .
we want a new charter in this old town. We are sick to death of
mayors, and fiist branches and second branches. In heaven’s name,
what have they done for us in the past ? I can tell you what they
have done for us in the thirteen years I have been here. To my
positive knowledge they have paved two or three streets east and
west, and two or three streets north and south, and by the Lord
Harry ! I could not point to a single other thing they have done
They haven’t given us a municipal hospital, they haven’t given us
a sewerage system, and we are still begging for lots of other things.
I would say to Mr. Carter : We want something new, and some-
thing good, and just you frame a charter without any of the ancient
tomfoolery, old-time Mayor and City Council. Give us a couple
or three good men and true who will run this city as a business
corporation. It would not take us a year then, Mr. Mayor, not a year,
to get a start on a sewerage system and an infectious-disease hospital,
and everything else that the public welfare demands. We would
have a sanatorium-system complete within a few years ; and, what
is more, your taxes would be reduced. . . .

Dr. Bowditch, the guest of the evening, recalls that this
unlooked-for tirade made his very hair stand on end, and
he fully expected that a southern duel would be precipitated,
but to his surprise, later in the evening, he saw the Mayor
with his arm over Osier’s shoulder, talking to him in a most
affectionate manner. ^ Osier was nothing if not frank he
adds ; ^ and the curious thing about it is that no one ever
seemed to take offence.’ It did not occur very often that
Osier thus let himself out, but this sort of direct outspoken-
ness was under the circumstances absolutely necessary to get
action on the part of the people. There was one touch in
his fiery speech to which attention may be drawn — his
inevitable reaction of sympathy for the man whose civic
apathy he was exposing — for, after all, he probably zvas
^ a good hard-worlang fellow ’ who didn’t get his deserts.

Some one has expressed concern lest the Osier in these
pages convey the impression of a ^ plaster saint ’ because of
the inherent kindness of heart which made him so greatly
beloved, and because he would never permit any one in his
presence to speak ill of another ; whereas in truth ^ what
adverse opinions he had to give were handed to the man
himself, full in the face ’ — as happened here and in the
episode of the A. M. A. meeting in May 1895.

572 Books and the Man Feb.-Mar. 1902

The sequel may be briefly told. At the next meeting of
the Maryland General Assembly a Tuberculosis Commission
was created without opposition. Meanwhile a group of
young society women called the ‘ Quarter Club ’ set out to
raise, by small sums, for which twenty-five-cent coupons
were given, a fund for the care of early cases of tuberculosis.
From this came the employment of a full-time tuberculosis
nurse ; and, in due sequence, the Maryland Association
for the Prevention and Cure of Tuberculosis ; a special
department at the Johns Hopkins with a bequest from
Mr. Phipps ; the Baltimore tuberculosis exhibit ; the
national association ; and much else besides. In these and
other ways they were, as Osier expressed it in a contemporary
letter, ‘ enjoying a quiet winter ’, which, however, was soon
to be interrupted by a university function that meant for
them a houseful of guests — no uncommon thing, to be sure.

Meanwhile Revere and his little friend Doris had formed
a secret society of two, and there were mysterious goings-on,
only vague hints of which were permitted to leak out even
to their especial playmate, who to the outside world was
a learned professor of medicine. And one may imagine the
bursts of joy and the swift and dire revenge when they
discovered that he was the perpetrator of the note, in
a disguised hand, sent to the female member of the society,
which read :

Office of the Chief of Police,

Ma’am Baltimore, Feb. 21st.

Youi Club is illegal and must be disbanded. Repoit to me,
with E R Ike O’ Slur at 12 tomorrow or a policeman will come for
you both. John McAdoo, Chief of Police.

This threat of criminal proceedings did not interfei e with
the ceremonies attending the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the founding of the university, which was celebrated on
this and the following day, Saturday, February 22nd. The
occasion marked the retirement of D. C. Gilman as President,
for, having reached the age of seventy, he wished to devote
his remaining years to the affairs of the Carnegie Institution.

The birthdays of the Johns Hopkins fall at a time of year
when weather conditions are unpropitious for the parading
of streets in academic costume, and though worse than

Aet. 52 D. C. Gilman’s Retirement 573

usual on this particular occasion, the weather could not
dampen the interest of the group of representatives who had
come from all the principal institutions of learning in the
United States and Canada. Mr. Gilman’s valedictory ; the
congratulatory address to the retiring President delivered
by Woodrow Wilson, representing the alumni ; the address
by Principal Peterson of McGill, who could not refrain from
complaining that the university was keeping Dr. William
Osier from his Alma Mater, which wanted and needed him ;
the inaugural of Ira Remsen, the new President — these and
the many other addresses need not detain us. Nor need the
list of distinguished men whom Mr. Gilman then presented
to his successor as recommended for various honorary
degrees, among them Professor Wilson of Princeton Uni-
versity, ‘ whose vision is so broad that it includes both
North and South ; a master of the principles which underlie
a free government ’.

The ceremonies ended on Saturday night with a large
alumni dinner at which there were so many to be called upon
that when it came to the turn of President Alderman of the
University of Virginia to speak, he glanced at the clock
and said ; ‘ Last week when this banquet began ’, &c. It
was two minutes past 12, and though there were other
speakers to follow, it is time to end this account of an
important episode in the history of the Hopkins, when its
leadership first changed hands.

Not many months before this event took place, announce-
ments had gone forth in the daily press that the Harvard
Medical School had been the recipient of princely sums
of money from J. Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller,
the latter stipulating that a sum comparable to his own
gift be raised by the community. How it happened that
Mr. Rockefeller came to be first a benefactor to Harvard
and subsequently to medicine in a far larger field, is made
clear in an exchange of letters of this time. The first of
them was written under the date of March 4th by Mr. F. T.
Gates, who introduced himself as ‘ Mr. Rockefeller’s repre-
sentative in many of his business enterprises and philan-
thropies, beginning with the establishment of the University
of Chicago ’. The letter went on to give Osier for the first

Books and the Man

574

Mar. 1902

time mucli of the information previously set down at length
regarding Mr. Gates’s occupation during the summer of
1897 and the resulting establishment of the Rockefeller
Institute. It also went on to say :

In the course of our study of the subject, we became acquainted
with the very excellent work being done at Harvard, and while it
was not thought best to connect the Institute with the Harvaid
Medical School, we were profoundly impressed with the veiy
superior work done at that institution. Accordingly, after the
establishment of the Institute in the tentative way above described,
Mr. Rockefeller contributed a million dollars to the Harvard School.
Both of these gifts grew directly out of your book. The first, while
not as yet large in money, has in it possibilities by no means circum-
scribed by the present gift. It has occurred to me that possibly
you might be gratified to know of an incidental and perhaps to you
quite unexpected good which your valuable work has wrought.

To Mr, F, T, Gates from W, 0 . March 5, 1902.

Dear Sir, — Your letter is, of course, very gratifying. I have been
greatly interested in the Rockefeller Institute, and feel sure that
good results will come of It. We are still far behind Germany in
this question of the scientific investigations of disease. Even our
best laboratories connected with the universities are imperfectly
equipped, the men in charge have too much teaching to do, there
are not enough assistants, and there is an increasing difficulty in
getting the best sort of men to devote themselves to scientific work.
One serious difficulty is the limited number of positions with which
living salaries are attached. For example, only last week a doctor
connected with the leading school in St. Louis came to me wishing
a pathologist and bacteriologist. They offered a salary of $2,000 1
and that is more than is paid by any of the other schools in the city.
Did you see the brief summaiy which I gave of the progress of
bacteriological science in the New York Sun last year in the general
reviews of the subject of science ? If you did not, I can have a copy
sent to you.

One can hardly believe from the character of Osier’s reply
that he could have fully grasped all that Mr. Gates had in
mind, for the comparatively small sum which, at the outset,
had been placed in the hands of the seven Directors of the
Institute was a mere feeler. That Mr. Gates had chanced
upon his ^ Practice of Medicine ’ rather than upon one of the
many text-books in which, with therapeutic enthusiasm,
drugs were prescribed for every disease and every symptom,
was "'of course very gratifying’, but nothing more. The

Aet.52 Another Happening 575

letter was tossed to Mrs. Osier, who fortunatelf preserved
it and called it to his mind two years later, when it stood
the university in great stead.

There was another happening in this month of March
which was followed by the bestowal of large funds for
educational as well as other purposes, and which in an
unexpected way was to touch Osier in his later years. The
long-drawn-out war in South Africa, though victory for the
British was practically assured, was not yet over when on
March 26th Cecil Rhodes died. He, too, though a very
different person, was the youngest of several sons in a clergy-
man’s family ; had expected to enter the Church ; and in
the world of affairs had reached the top, as had Osier at the
same age in the world of medicine. With vision and
idealism, Rhodes had left the bulk of his large fortune to
found scholarships at Oxford to be held by picked men from
each of the United States, from the British Dominions, and
from Germany, with the object of fostering an understand-
ing between the three great powers which would render
future wars impossible. With these Oxford Rhodes Scholars
Osier will have much to do ; though the object, alas, for
which Rhodes wished these representative young men to be
brought together was not attained. Nor, seventeen years
later, was the world ready to accept a still more ambitious
programme to ensure future peace, introduced by the young
Princeton professor who had just played so prominent
a part in the Hopkins celebration a month before.

Meanwhile, his collection of books was growing, and one
acquisition he mentions in a note of early March to
C. N. B. Camac : [undated].

So sorry to have missed you — will try to give you warning next
time. When are you coming down ? There are many things I wish to
talk about with you & some of my new old tieasuies would delight
you. Hunter McGuire left me a set of Jenner’s Vaccination Mono-
graphs — all autograph copies to his friend [Henry] Shrapnell. It is
really a great treasure. . . . Mrs. O & Ike are well. So glad to hear
you are getting consultations. Get out 2 or 3 good papers each year
— they help.

It was a characteristic ending, and a form of advice in which
he set abundant example, as his own bibliography continues

576 Books and the Man Apr.-Mayi902

to testify. The letter merely shows that he had dropped in
on one of his old house officers while on a fleeting visit to
New York. This was his invariable habit when chance took
him to their places of residence, and some incident of such
an occasion rarely failed to stick in the memory of the person
thus favoured. Thus Dr. Camac relates that having once
received a telegram that W. O. would be in town and asking
could they dine together, a few young men were invited
to meet him. After dinner the talk ran to books, and on
Camac’s producing a copy of Brillat-Savarin’s ‘ Physiologic
du Gout ’, one of the party mistaking the French word
gout for the English word, became somewhat involved,
whereupon Osier, to save him embarrassment and to put
him right in a gentle way, quoted the well-known epigram ;

The French have taste in all thev do.

Which we are quite without ;

For Nature, which to them gave go%t.

To us gave only gout.

A trifling incident, to be sure, but a good example of the
same kindly way in which Osier would lead one of his class-
room pupils aright without permitting the young man to
blush before his fellows.

On April 2nd the Philadelphia College of Physicians
held a memorial meeting for Alfred Stifle, who had died
at eighty-seven, the last survivor of the group of Louis’s
pupils. Osier gave the chief address,'- and largely in the
words of his old friend recounted anew the story of the
differentiation of the two fevers, typhoid and typhus, which
had been worked out in the old Blockley Hospital during
the epidemic of 1836 by Gerhard and Pennock and their
junior co-worker. Stifle. The address ended with the line,
borrowed from Stifle, that ‘ only two things are essential,
to live uprightly and to be wisely industrious ’, a line which
might be made the text of this present biography.

But with all these absences — and there were many others
which might be mentioned — his local, routine activities must
not be overlooked. ‘ No, I cannot possibly take more than

^ Reprinted m ‘ An Alabama Student and other Biographical Essays
1908.

Aet 52 An Unauthorized Edition 577

twenty-five men he writes to the Dean on April 22nd. ‘ All
through May we have the undergraduates as well, which
makes too great a crowd altogether in the wards. I was very
sorry that I could not get over to Gaule’s lecture, but there
was a meeting of the Executive Committee of the State
Faculty at that time, and as I am Chairman I was obliged
to be present.’ Indeed the annual gathering of the Faculty
was being held at the time, and to the programme he con-
tributed a timely lecture on ‘ The Diagnosis of Smallpox ’
— a subject with which he was aU too familiar. There had
been many increasingly severe outbreaks of the disease, not
only in Maryland but in other parts of the country, due to
the neglect of vaccination, which had got a bad name because
of an impure lymph which had been put on the market.

Though the usual distracting succession of spring meetings
soon followed, he was at work meanwhile on an unexpected
revision of the T ext-book. T o this he refers in the following
letter to Joseph H. Pratt, one of the Hopkins students, who
since his graduation in 1898 had been in the pathological
department of Harvard, and was now abroad :

May 9, 1902.

Dear Pratt, — It was very nice to get your letter of the 25th, and
to find that you are in good hands. I am sure you will find Krehl
a most satisfactory man. Please give him my regards. I will have
a copy of my Text-book sent to him, and a volume of our Studies
in Typhoid Fever. I will send you this week the list of books for the
tuberculosis library. I haven’t had them copied, so please take good
care of this list, which is in Dr. Welch’s handwriting. I will enclose
a memorandum with reference to certain ones which we have.
Keep a close eye on some coriections for the Text-book like a good
fellow. Use youi pencil freely. Suggestions for rearrangement will
be in order. . . . Take good care of yourself and do not work too
hard ; and sample a fair amount of beer in the course of a week.

Though only a year had elapsed since the last revision,
a new edition was necessitated by the fact that, owing to
an oversight, copyright had not been taken out in Great
Britain. An unauthorized edition had promptly been
issued at a much reduced price, which had greatly interfered
with the legitimate sale of the book in Great Britain and
Canada. As Osier said in a later letter of explanation,’- ‘ the
Lancet, Lond., April ii, 1903, i. 1058.
p P

2923 I

Books and the Man

May-June 1902

578

circumstances justified what Rabelais calls the pretty-
perquisite of a superfoetation

He was laid up with one of his periodical attacks the latter
part of the month, and from his bed sent letters which say
that not for years had he enjoyed a book so much as Kuss-
maul’s ^Jugenderinnei ungen’ — ^nothing so good that I
know of in the way of medical autobiography ’ . In his engage-
ment book, opposite the dates May 18-23, where entries for
his afternoon consultations would occur, there is written,
^Influenza: frontal sinus’; and opposite May 24-31,

‘ Atlantic City ’. This was the occasion when he impishly
signed the name of Egerton Y. Davis under that of Mrs.
Osier on the Hotel Chelsea register. Among letters written
on his return is this cryptic note to H. V. Ogden, w^ho had
evidently heard rumours of his ill health :

vi.1.02.

Dear O. I am all right. I had a Schnupfen which rose into my
sinuses & used me up foi a week. They telephoned me one night
to come & see L P ^ but as it was i a m and I had had a hot bath
I declined & sent Thayer, I had seen the old boy the day before
& there was nothing to do. Mis 0 is well Sc Morris is back from
the hospital so the family is again ^ gesund Thanks for the memo
— about Ex Ophth G. We go to Murray Bay. We had our passage
for the 25th, but as we would have to return early — I give the
address in Med. — Can Med in Montreal — we decided to give it
up. I wish to get over early next year and have a 6 wrecks period
of study in Paris. — Come. Love to all of you. Am rejoicing in
a sumptuous copy of Fuller’s Worthies, 1662, from B. Q. Yours,

W, O.

There had been a good deal of discussion in the pages of
the journals at this time about the teaching of medical
history — no new thing, be it said, for in Vienna, Berlin, and
in most of the Italian medical schools there had actually
been professorships of the subject. Osier, though he did
not believe, with the existing crowded state of the curricu-
lum, that a full course could be offered, was aroused by an
editorial in the Bnttsh Meitcal Journal to send a description

^ ‘ L P ’ was Lord Pauncefote, the first British Ambassador, who duiing
his long period of service in Washington had with John Hay been quietly
clearing away the many disputed problems, long sources of misunderstanding
between the two countries.

Aet. 52 Over Beer and Baccy 579

of what was being done in Baltimore in this direction.^
In this he spoke of John S. Billings’s lectures ; of the work
of the Historical Club ; of the effort even in the everyday
ward-work to make the student get the habit of going to
original sources ; of his Saturday evenings with the students
wlien, over a little ^ beer and baccy he was apt to give
a short talk on one of the ^ masters of medicine ’ ; and he
ended with this quotation from Fuller, the sumptuous copy
of whose ^ Worthies ’ had so recently come from Bernard
Quaritch :

History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles
or grey hairs ; privileging him with the experience of age, without
either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Yea, it not onely
maketh things past present, but inableth one to make a rationall
conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new
accidents, but in the same sense wherein we call it a new Moon^
which is the old one in another shape, and yet no other than what
had been formerly. Old actions return again, furbished over with
some new and different circumstances.

Not only in medical history was he beginning to be
thoroughly steeped, but his infection with the bibliomania
was becoming chronic. Among his posthumous papers were
a number of stray leaves, representing the rough draft of an
article, some of which may have been written at this time
of comparative idleness at the seashore when Thomas Fuller
was in his mind, and E. Y^. D. in his reactions :

BURROWINGS OF A BOOKWORM

by

Eger ton Yorrick Davis, Jr.

I. Apologia, In the final stage of the malady, sung of so sweetly
by John Ferriar, and described so minutely by Dibdin, the biblio-
maniac haunts the auction rooms and notes with envious eyes the
precious volumes as they are handed about for inspection, or chortles
with joy as he hears the bids rise higher and higher for some precious
treasure already in his possession. Of this final enthraldom the chief
symptom, not mentioned indeed by Dibdin, is the daily perusal of
the catalogues of auction sales. . . . Like the secret drinker with a full
bottle by his side and the kettle on the trivet the victim in this last
stage indulges his passion alone and is never so happy as [when] with a
Sotheby catalogue and the help of Livington or Karslake, he prepares

^ ‘ A Note on the Teaching of the History of Medicine.’ British Medual
Journal^ 1902, July 12, ii. 93.

P p 2

Books and the Man

580

June 1902

to send his bids to the auction firm. Though the spiiit of the gambler
is upon him there is method in his mania, for he makes his calculations
with shrewdness and knows the prices which his favouiite books have
brought. He is never disappointed, for he has a strong conviction
that the world is one big auction room in which the gods sell every-
thing to the man who can work or to the man who can wait. If he
loses to-day tomorrow may bring luck, and this element of uncertainty
gives zest to the dispute. Into this final stage I confess to have lapsed,
gradually and insensibly, and without the loss of my self-respect.
Nor is he an indiscriminate buyer, seeking incunabula and editions
de luxe with equal avidity, but one guiding principle, deep inUrest
in an author limits the range of his desires and keeps his library within
the compass of his house and purse. The great difficulty is to keep
the passion within bounds, so fascinating and so numerous is the
company into which it brings him ! Any one of the elect may absorb
his energies for months. Charles Lamb says that he lived on Landor’s
little poem Rose Aylmer for a week. After first finding Fuller I lived
on him for six months ; and when hungry or thirsty after the mental
labours of the day, I find refreshment in the Worthies or in any page
of the Holy and Profane State, Before this happy stage is reached
you must know the man — not that biography slxould precede, rather
indeed it should follow, the systematic study of a man’s work, but
to get on terms of refreshing intimacy you must love the man as
a friend and know the phases of his mind as expressed in his writings.
To be supiemely happy, to the instinct of the collector must be
added the mental attitude of the student. Either alone lacks com-
pleteness ; the one supplements the other. I can read with pleasure
a classic such as Rasselas though issued in ^ penny dreadful ’ form by
Mr. Stead, [but] feel nearer to the immortal Samuel when I hold
the original in my hand. It is all a matter of sentiment — so it is,
but the very marrow of my bones is full of sentiment, and as I feel
towards my blood relations — or some of them ! — and to my intimate
friends in the flesh, so I feel to these friends in the spirit with whom
I am in communion through the medium of the printed word. , . .

The Association of Medical Librarians, with sixteen
members present and Osier in the chair, met in Saratoga on
June loth, the day before the sessions of the American
Medical Association opened. Osier had packed ^ the meet-
ing by bringing in a few of his assistants, and they were
well repaid, for he read a delightful address on ‘ Some
Aspects of American Medical Bibliography ’ — an address ^
prepared with no less care for this small group of people
than it would have been for a larger audience. A single
^ Reprinted as No. XV in ‘ Aequammitas and other Addresses

Aet. 52

On Medical Bibliography 581

example of what he called his ^ splintery ’ and rambling
remarks regarding that aspect of medical bibliography
which relates to writings which have a value to us from our
interest in the authors may be given :

There are many single volumes for which you will be on the lookout,
Caldwell’s ^ Autobiography ’ is a storehouse of facts (and fancies !)
relating to the University of Pennsylvania, to Rush and to the
early days of the Transylvania University and the Cincinnati schools.
Pickled, as it is, in vinegar, the work is sure to survive.

Have carefully re-bound James Jackson’s Memoir of his son (1835),
and put it in the way of the young men among your readers. Few
biographies will do them more good.

For the curious, pick up the literature on the Chapman-Pattison
quarrel, and anything, in fact, relating to that vivacious and pug-
nacious Scot, Granville Sharpe Pattison,

There are a few full-blown medical biographies of special interest
to us : The life and writings of that remarkable philosopher and
physician, Wells, of Charleston. The life of John C. Warren (i860)
is full of inteiest, and in the ^ Essays ’ of David Hosack you will
get the inner history of the profession in New York in the early
years of the last century. In many ways Daniel Drake is the most
unique figure in the history of American medicine. Get his ‘ Life ’
by Mansfield, and his ^ Pioneer Life in Kentucky ’. He literally
made Cincinnati, having ‘ boomed ’ it in the early days in his cele-
brated ^Picture of Cincinnati’, 1815. He founded nearly every-
thing that is old and good in that city. His monumental work on
^ The Diseases of the Mississippi Valley ’ is in every library ; pick
out from the catalogues every scrap of his writings.

And he concluded with this paragraph :

What should attract us all is a study of the growth of the American
mind in medicine since the starting of the colonies. As in a mirror
this story is reflected in the literature of which you are the guardians
and collectors — in letters, in manuscripts, in pamphlets, in books
and journals. In the eight generations which have passed, the men
who have striven and struggled — ^men whose lives are best described
in the words of St. Paul, in journeyings often, in perils of water, in
perils of the city, in perils of the sea, in weariness and painfulness,
in watchings often, in hunger and thirst and fastings — these men,
of some of whom I have told you somewhat, have made us what
we are. With the irrevocable past into which they have gone lies
our future, since our condition is the resultant of forces which, in
these generations, have moulded the profession of a new and mighty
empire. From the vantage ground of a young century we can trace
in the literature how three great streams of influence — English,

Books and the Man

582

June 1902

French and German — have blended into the broad current of
American medicine on which we are afloat. Adaptiveness, lucidity
and thoroughness may be said to be the characteristics of these
Anglican, Gallic and Teuton influences, and it is no small part of
your duty to see that these influences the combination of which
gives to medicine on this continent its distinctive eclectic quality,
are maintained and extended.

Immediately after the A. M. A. meeting there was a large
subscription dinner given on June 13th at Delmonico’s in
New York in honour of Surgeon-General Sternberg, whose
retirement had just taken place. There had been some idle
claims put forth, by partisans rather than principals, as to
who deserved chief credit for the yellow fever discoveries in
Cuba, the only thing about the Spanish War and its after-
math from which any special credit was to be drawn. Well-
deserved tributes for his pioneer work on this subject were
paid to Sternberg by the speakers at the dinner, among
whom were E. G. Janeway, Welch, Goigas, Osier, and
others. And it was Gorgas, ere long to be Sternberg’s
successor, who put his finger on the point at issue, in his
statement that had the work of the commission been less
fortunate in its outcome General Sternberg would have
received the entire blame, and consequently the success
should be his also.

As stated in his cryptic letter of June ist to Ogden, the
Osiers had decided not to go to England for the summer,
but to Murray Bay on the St. Lawrence. They had been
influenced by several things. His mother, who was ninety-
six, seemed less vigorous than usual ; moreover he had two
addresses to prepare, one for the Canadian Medical Associa-
tion, which was to meet in Montreal under F. J. Shepherd’s
presidency, the other to be given later on in St. Louis.
‘ We have taken a house,’ he wrote, ‘ and I doubt if I shall
be bothered much with patients. It will give me a good
fourteen weeks’ rest.’ On the eve of his departure he
wrote :

To Henry M. Hurd from W. O. i West Franklin Street,

June 21, 1902.

Dear Hurd, — So sorry to go off before your return. I hope you
had a good meeting in Montreal. I am terribly distressed to hear
of the death there of poor Wyatt Johnston. He was a nice, good

Aet. 52 The new Medical Building 583

fellow and a very dear friend of mine. I am going to Toronto to
the Celebration at Trinity, and then on to Murray Bay, where
I hope to remain peacefully and quietly for the summer.

One point about the new buildings rather distressed me. I wrote
to Mr. Archer about it, but have had no reply. I understand from
a conversation with Emerson that they will cut oif four of the rooms
of the Clinical Laboratory, which is a very serious loss, consideiing
how cramped we are there at present, and as the classes increase it
will be a very serious matter. Would it not be possible to arrange
that on the upper floor, at any rate, the same space as at present
could be utilized? The rooms for preparations and for special
workers of course ought to be close at hand. Emerson is really
getting out some first-class work from his department, and we should
encourage him as much as possible. It is the sort of work that has
not been done here before and I think will tell.

I am having one of my young proteges, a very bright fellow,
a senior student at Toronto University, come down for the months
of July and August to work in the wards and dispensary. His name
is Locke, and he is the son of a very old and dear chum of mine.
I told McCrae to look after him, and have asked him to call upon
you. Another point — do you not think it would be well to put
Cordell’s picture in the front of that volume? Ask Ashby and
Preston what they think about it. He has done so much work that
there ought to be some recognition. I hope in October to get up
a little fund for him and hold a reception. I have arranged with
Thayer about the private ward, and he and Futcher will be on hand
to help McCrae with anything special in the public wards.

He has done so much work that there ought to be some
recognition ’ — this is a characteristic phrase in Osier’s letters,
and he was for ever getting up funds for deserving people.
Dr. Weir Mitchell was once heard to say that the first thing
to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to
examine the stubs of his victim’s cheque-books. Osier’s
expenditures, however, can be easily traced between the
lines of his brief letters. Just at this time he is paying the
expenses, as mentioned in this letter, of the son of his old-
time chum, Charles Locke ; there is a distant cousin of
a younger generation, whom he had never seen, with
consumption, and for whom a twelve-months’ sojourn in
Saranac has been made possible ; a monthly cheque goes to
his nieces ; the assistants that he takes with him to Saratoga,
as well as the librarians, have their expenses paid ; and
Morris, meanwhile, gives out something to every one who

Books and the Man

5^4

July 1902

knocks, or plays a hurdy-gurdy, at the doord One need
not examine the stubs of Osier’s cheque-books.

The ‘ celebration at Trinity ’ which preceded the Murray
Bay sojourn was the occasion of his receiving a D.C.L. at
the hands of his first Alma Mater. Since 1874 there had
been sporadic efforts to amalgamate Trinity College with
the University of Toronto. Not without some heart-
burning this union was about to be accomplished, for the
old mischievous cry of a ‘ Godless college ’ which would have
been raised in Father Johnson’s time was ere this repre-
sented by a very feeble voice. It was the last convocation
held separately by Trinity, and degrees were bestowed on
a number of distinguished Canadians. One of them, in all
probability, as he sat on the platform in his old college with
thoughts far away, was engaged in writing ‘James Bovell’
on his programme.

On the Saguenay boat from Quebec they encountered, in
addition to a pair of rabbits and a pet billy-goat, seven
children, whose mother proved to be the widow of his old
Montreal fellow-student, Harry Wright. Then and there
began an intimacy which meant the quasi-adoption of these
children, like those of Palmer Howard, as members of his
family. With them, and with the children of the Tafts, the
Blakes, the Wrongs, and other neighbours at Pointe-a-Pic,
P.Q., there were many games played and dams constructed
and picnics held during the summer, which with golf and
fishing and reading betweentimes was most happily passed.
He was much sought after, not only by the children but by
their elders. As Chief Justice Taft recalls :

We had cottages which were not very far apart, and I used to see
a great deal of him on picnics as well as informal gatherings in that
very delightful community. Revere was just about the age of my
son Charlie and all the children were in and out of the Osier house.
He had a love of humour and a disposition to joke others in a playful
way. The wonder that came over me was at the universal knowledge
of the man. He was not only most learned, but applied that learning
with a keen common-sense and a sense of proportion that must have

^ Morris’s petty-cash account was good reading : ‘ Parcel 50 cents,
music 5 cents, beggar lo cents, Dr. Osier 15 cents,’ — the last in response
to the frequent appeal, as the tram was heard rattling down the hill,
‘ Here ’s the car ! Morris, quick, some change ! ’

Aet. S3 A Child and a Bishop 585

been the basis of the influence he wielded not only in his profession
but in the community at large.

This hint of ^ picnics and informal gatherings ’ is not
betrayed in the many notes which issued from Pointe-a-Pic
during the summer to his librarian-friends at McGill and
Toronto, ashing for some journal or other, or for informa-
tion : ^ Do you know if the complete typhoid figures of
the S. A. war are at hand, i. e. the total cases and the total
deaths up to say May ist. Look, like an angel, in the Lancet
index, for the last half year and the B. M. J. and let me
know.’ And to Miss Thies, who was being kind to his
young protege in Baltimore :

2 lSt.

Dear Miss Thesis, How many have subscribed to the volume
which Dr. Cordell is preparing? Did you and Miss Noyes send out
postal cards to all the members of the Faculty who had not yet
subscribed ? I hope you are not over-worked. You must get a good
holiday when your chiefess ’ comes back. Mr. Locke writes that
you are all very kind to him — many thanks.

Nor did he entirely escape from patients. One of his little
companions of the dam-making coterie must have an
operation for blood-poisoning, and he insisted on coming
every day to dress the wound himself. Then a bishop was
taken ill, so a microscope must be procured from Montreal,
and there followed a shower of postcards like this to
W. S. Thayer :

Pointe-a-Pic, vii. 27. 02.

I am sending cover slips — bad ones too — of case — fevei 9 w.
duration — B. of Can. Diagnosis of malaria aestivo-autum. in N. Y.
Parasites in blood. Slides sent to Martin in Montreal, report
negative Report from relative of patient in Chicago positive —
Martin sent microscope to-day & I have gone over 4 specimens
without finding ring-bodies pigment or crescents. No spleen — this
[diagram] T. 100--103. Old Corrigan’s disease ; no signs sub, 01 obj.
of fresh endocarditis save the fever. Please go over the slides with
the greatest care & telegraph me. Put down his name on your
visiting list for consultation See. Love to S. S. so glad to hear she
is better W. O.

Meanwhile Mrs. Osier writes to the latch-keyers ’ at
3 West Franklin Street that they are very comfortable, with
plenty of room (for guests) and a lovely view ; that W. O.

Aet 53 Varieties of Chauvinism 587

What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance,
conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes
the mental attitude perennially antagonistic to everything
foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation,
forgetting the higher claims to human brotherhood.’ There
followed the last section, on provincialism in medicine —

‘ a very unpleasant sub-variety of nationalism ‘ After all
these years,’ he said, ‘ that a young man, a graduate of
Toronto and a registered practitioner in Ontario, cannot
practise in the Province of Quebec, his own country, without
submitting to vexatious penalties of mind and pocket, or
that a graduate from Montreal and a registered practitioner
of this province cannot go to Manitoba, his own country
again, and take up his life’s work without additional pay-
ments and penalties is, I maintain, an outrage ; it is pro-
vincialism nin riot. That this pestiferous condition should
exist through the various provinces of this Dominion and
so many States of the Union, illustrates what I have said of
the tyranny of democracy and how great enslavers of liberty
its chief proclaimers may be.’ From this he went on to
parochialism in medicine ; in other words, to the personal
aspects of Chauvinism which applies to all individuals :

There are [he said] shades and varieties which are by no means
offensive. Many excellent features in a man’s character may partake
of its nature. What, for example, is more proper than the pride
which we feel in our teachers, in the university from which we
have graduated, in the hospital at which we have been trained !
He is a ‘ poor sort ’ who is free from such feelings which only mani-
fest a proper loyalty. But it easily degenerates into a base intolerance
which looks with disdain on men of other schools and other ways.
The pride, too, may be in inverse proportion to the justness of the
claims. There is plenty of room for honest and friendly rivalry
between schools and hospitals, only a blind Chauvinism puts a man
into a hostile and intolerant attitude of mind at the mention of
a name. Alumni and friends should remember that indiscriminate
praise of institutions or men is apt to rouse the frame of mind illus-
trated by the ignorant Athenian who, so weary of hearing Aristides
always called the Just, very gladly took up the oyster shell for his
ostracism, and even asked Aristides himself, whom he did not know,
to mark it. . . .

He spoke of collegiate Chauvinism, so often ‘ manifest in
the narrow spirit displayed in filling appointments ’ ; of its

Books and the Man

588

Sept. 1902

unpleasant manifestations due to the competition existing
in scientific circles which leads to a narrowness of judgement
instead of a generous appreciation of the work of others ;
and he warned against the jealous spirit of the ^ lock and key ’
laboratory. Butj he continued :

Chauvinism in the unit, in the general practitioner, is of much
more interest and importance. It is amusing to read and hear of
the passing of the family physician. There never was a time in our
history in which he was so much in evidence, in which he was so
prosperous, in which his prospects were so good or his power in the
community more potent. The public has even begun to get senti-
mental over him ! He still does the work ; the consultants and the
specialists do the talking and the writing — and take the fees ! By
the work, I mean that great mass of routine practice which brings
the doctor into every household in the land and makes him, not
alone the adviser, but the valued friend. He is the standard by
which we are measuied. What he is we are ; and the estimate of
the profession in the eyes of the public is their estimate of him.
A well trained sensible family doctor is one of the most valuable
assets in a community, worth to-day, as in Homer’s time, many
another man. To make him efficient is our highest ambition as
teacheis, to save him from evil should be our constant care as a
guild. ... Few men live lives of more devoted self-sacrifice than the
family physician but he may become so completely absorbed in work
that leisure is unknown. . . . There is danger in this treadmill life
lest he lose more than health and time and rest — his intellectual
independence. More than most men he feels the tragedy of isola-
tion — that inner isolation so well expressed in Matthew Arnold’s
line — ‘ We mortal millions live alone , Even in populous districts
the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the
way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable
Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of which
Bunyan tells, Knowledge ^ Experience^ Watchful and Sincere. The
circumstances of life mould him into a masterful, self-confident,
self-centred man, whose worst faults often partake of his best quali-
ties. The peril is that should he cease to think for himself he becomes
a mere automaton, doing a penny-in-the-slot business which places
him on a level with the chemist’s cleik who can hand out specifics
for every ill, from the ‘ pip ’ to the pox. The salt of life for him is
a judicious scepticism, not the coarse crude form, but the sober
sense of honest doubt expressed in the maxim of the sly old Sicilian
Epicharmus, ‘ Be sober and distrustful ; these are the sinews of the
understanding.’

The address, which ended with the following paragraph,

Aet. 53 The Profession as a Whole 589

would almost stand as a fit biography of William Osier, could
one read sufficiently widely and far between the lines :

I began by speaking of the art of detachment as that rare and
precious quality demanded of one who wished to take a philosophic
view of the profession as a whole. In another way and in another
sense this art may be still more precious. There is possible to each
one of us a higher type of intellectual detachment, a sort of separa-
tion from the vegetative life of the work-a-day world — always too
much with us — which may enable a man to gam a true knowledge
of himself and of his relations to his fellows. Once attained, self-
deception is impossible, and he may see himself even as he is seen —
not always as he would like to be seen — and his own deeds and the
deeds of others stand out in their true light. In such an atmosphere
pity for himself is so commingled with sympathy and love for
others that there is no place left for criticism or for a harsh judge-
ment of his brother. ^ But these are Thoughts of things which
Thoughts but tenderly touch,’ as that most liberal of men and most
distinguished of general practitioners, Sir Thomas Browne, so beauti-
fully remarks ; and it may be sufficient to remind this audience,
made up of practical men, that the woid of action is stronger than the
zvord of speech.

Needless to say, there were more people to see and visits
to make in Montreal than he could encompass, 'and notes
had to be sent late at night from Dr. Shepherd’s, where he
was staying — ^ So sorry to miss you to-day, but I was hard
pushed & had some lo calls to make & the new M. G. H.
plans to look over &c. At the end of the three-days’ visit
he disappeared, leaving Mrs. Osier to get his nephew settled
as a house officer in the Royal Victoria Hospital ; and from
Toronto a few days later she wrote, saying ; ^ I sunned
myself in my husband’s glory in Montreal, and as he departed
at dawn Thursday not waiting to hear what was said of his
address I was inflated with pride and left very humble-
minded and impressed with my utter inability to cope with
my position as spouse to such an admired object.’

The ^ admired object ’ had escaped to Saranac Lake to
see a distant cousin who had been there for a few months,
and to whom reference has been made. Two days were
spent with Trudeau ; and Lawrason Brown, who was then
in the Sanitarium, recalls an incident of the visit ; for, on
Osier’s being shown the clinical records he tapped them
and said : ^ A man who speaks of his experience and has it

590 Books and the Man Sept.-Oct. 1902

recorded in this way knows whereof he is talking/ Up to
that time Trudeau, trusting to his unusual memory, had
never kept records of his private patients, but this episode
started him doing so,

jT 0 John H, Musserfrom W, O, i West Franklin Street [undated]

Dear J. H. Glad to see you are back ! Thanks for the descrip-
tion of the Rylands Library. I am most anxious to see it. I have
heard from one or two men in Manchester since the meeting — all
seem to have been delighted with you. We had a charming summer.
Mrs O & Ike enjoyed it so much. The place is ideal in many ways.
I have my neck in the yoke again. Am very busy with an address
on Beaumont, The family put his papers in my hands some years
ago. I hope to see you before long. I shall be in Phila the week
after next. Glad to have a note from Hare about the Wood-Keen
dinner. Yours, W. O. Love to all at home.

Evidently he was no sooner off with the C. M. A. address
than he was on with the preparation of another, concerning
which among other things he soon dictated a letter to George
Dock in Ann Arbor :

Sept. 24, 1902.

I think that the figures given in the Physician and Surgeon^ pub-
lished at the time of the Memorial Exercises at Mackinac are suffi-
cient. The old officers’ quarters are given and one or two of the
old block-houses. I wish I could §0 out by way of Michigan, but
I shall go through Pittsburgh and Columbus. I saw the letters of
Shrapnell, particularly about that interesting shipwreck. He was
a gentleman at any rate to bind all the [Jenner] pamphlets together.
It seems a pity to break them up, but I think they are worth while
binding separately in good style, and I shall probably deposit them
in one of the libraries.^ I got back on Sunday. We had a very good
meeting in Montreal. You will see my Chauvinistic address in
American Medicine and the Phtla Medical Journal this week.
I believe I have been curiously led astray by two distinguished
professors as to the origin of the word chauvinism. I give it quite
different from that given by Biewer who is likely to be right.

Enough has been said already in these pages of Osier’s
interest in the story of Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin — an
interest which goes back to his Montreal days, when he was
frustrated in his efforts to secure St. Martin’s stomach for
the Surgeon-GeneraFs Museum. That he should have gone

^ W. O. had loaned the papers to Dock, who made their study the basis of
an address. New To^k Medical Journal^ Nov. 29, 1902, et seq

Aet. 53 A June Day in 1822 591

so far afield as to St. Louis to give an address on ^ Beaumont,
a pioneer American physiologist V is accounted for by the
fact that St. Louis had been Beaumont’s place of residence
after his resignation from the army, and, besides, Osier’s
friends, Baumgarten and Fischel, intimates in the Associa-
tion of American Physicians, were both members of the
local medical society before which on October 4th the
address was given. He introduced the story as follows : ^

Come with me for a few moments on a lovely June day in 1822,
to what were then far-off northern wilds, to the Island of Michili-
mackinac, where the waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron
unite and where stands Fort Mackinac, rich in the memories of
Indian and voyageur, one of the four important posts on the upper
lakes in the days when the rose and the fleur-de-lys strove for the
mastery of the western world. Here the noble Marquette laboured
for his Lord, and here beneath the chapel of St. Ignace they laid his
bones to rest. Here the intrepid La Salle, the brave Tonty and the
lesolute Du Luht had halted in their wild wanderings. Its palisades
and block-houses had echoed the war-whoops of Ojibways and
Ottawas, of Hurons and Iroquois, and the old fort had been the
scene of bloody massacres and hard-fought fights, but at the con-
clusion of the War of 1812, after two centuries of struggle, peace
settled at last on the island. The fort was occupied by United
States troops, who kept the Indians in check and did general police
duty on the frontier, and the place had become a rendezvous for
Indians and voyageurs in the employ of the American Fur Company.
On this bright spring morning the village presented an animated
scene. The annual return tide to the trading-post was in full course,
and the beach was thronged with canoes and bateaux laden with the
pelts of the winter’s hunt. Voyageurs and Indians, men, women and
children, with here and there a few soldiers, made up a motley
crowd. Suddenly from the company’s store there is a loud report
of a gun, and amid the confusion and excitement the rumour spreads
of an accident, and there is a hurrying of messengers to the barracks
for a doctor. In a few minutes an alert-looking young man in the
uniform of a U. S. Army surgeon made his way through the crowd
and was at the side of a young French Canadian who had been
wounded by the discharge of a gun, and with a composure bred of
an exceptional experience of such injuries, prepared to ‘make the
examination. Though youthful in appearance. Surgeon Beaumont

^ Journal of American Medical Assoc. y 1902, xxxix 1223. Reprinted
as ‘ A Backwood Physiologist’ in the ‘Alabama Student 1908.

^ He had used the same account eight years before at the close of his
address on ‘ The Army Smgeon

Books and the Man

592

Oct. 1902

had seen much service, and at the capture of York and at the invest-
ment of Plattsburgh he had shown a coolness and bravery under
fire which had won high praise from his superior officers. The man
and the opportunity had met — the outcome is my story of this
evening. . . .

He went on to tell of Beaumont’s relations to the young
French Canadian, whom he took into his own house and
nursed to health, and of his trials in regard to the experi-
ments on digestion which were subsequently undertaken
with the wayward and stubborn fellow, ‘ that old fistulous
Alexis ’ who for so many years survived the man who made
him famous. Even as it was, with far less accomplished than
Beaumont could have wished, many of the phenomena
occurring during the process of ordinary digestion, including
the nature and mode of action of the gastric juice, whose acid
component was shown to be hydrochloric acid by Benjamin
Silliman at Yale, were studied for the first time and made
clear.

Osier’s appearance in St. Louis to give this address had the
usual stimulating effect on the local profession, for due solely
to this visit a society for the study of medical history was
inaugurated.^ But for such studies books are tools, and it is
quite consistent to find him, two weeks later, presiding at
a dinner in Philadelphia given for the Executive Committee
of the Association of Medical Librarians and several others
interested in the history of medicine. At this time it was
proposed that the former bulletin of the association be
merged with the Medical Library and Historical Journal,
the first issue of which, under the editorship of Albert Tracy
Huntington, appeared in the following January. During
its all-too-short five years of life this excellent journal
continued, as the official organ of the association, to print
its transactions and book-exchange lists. With the death of
Huntington the journal came to its end, and after Osier’s

^ One of Its most active membeis, the late Dr Jesse S. Myer, ten years
later published a complete and copiously illustrated biography of Beaumont
for which Osier wrote an introduction Therein is given the full story of the
man who in Osier’s words ^ recognized, grasped, and improved the opportu-
nity which fell in his path, with a zeal and an unselfishness not excelled in the
annals of medical science (‘ Life and Letters of William Beaumont.’
St. Louis, 1912.)

Aet. 53 Bedside Epigrams 593

departure from America, though the association lost his
guiding hand, it resumed the publication of an independent
bulletin, restored its exchange bureau to the head-quarters
in Baltimore, and has since continued as an active and most
useful organization^

Shortly before this, on October 7th to be exact, he had
been elected to membership in the Grolier Club of New
York, but the fact of his being, if anything, more interested
in the building up of libraries in general rather than in the
making of a personal collection, has been made sufficiently
clear.

To John H, Musserfrom W. 0 . Oct. 22, 1902.

I like your scheme very much for the library. It would really be
unique in a way. The next time you come down I would like you
to see the list of books we have been gradually collecting at the
Medical & Chirurgical Library relating to biography and history.
I have just received a superb copy of the first edition of Locke’s
Essay, which I have been after for a good many years. Some years
ago I made a list of the most important literary works by physicians.
I will try to find it and let you have a copy.

From these things about ^ books and the man Osier may
be picked up again in the hospital wards, for after all it was
at the bedside with his students about him that he was at
his very best. So picturesque, indeed, were many of his
spontaneous bedside epigrams that they have been preserved
in many a student’s note-book : ^

There are incurable diseases in medicine, incorrigible vices in the
ministry, insoluble cases in law.

Probability is the rule of life — especially under the skin. Never
make a positive diagnosis.

Raynaud’s disease and chilblains are Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

^ A new journal started, or an old journal revivified, was almost sure to
have Osier’s name as a collaborator or a contributor, or often as both. Thus
the first volume of a new series of the International Climes under the editorship
of A. O. J. Kelly begins with a paper from his pen, in which the fourteen
cases of a particular form of aneurysm observed in his clinic were fully
discussed.

^ Two of the students, indeed, thinking to turn an honest penny, gathered
a sufficient number of what they called ‘ Oslerisms ’ to make a small volume,
for which they found a ready publisher who issued an announcement of the
book, but Osier promptly ‘ sat ’ upon it.

2923 I Q q

Books and the Man

594

Nov, 1902

Who serves the gods dies young — enus, Bacchus, and Vulcan send
in no bills in the seventh decade.

Common-sense nerve fibres are seldom medullated before forty —
they are never seen even with the microscope before twenty.

The mental kidney more often than the abdominal is the one that
floats.

Although one swallow does not make a summer, one tophus makes
gout and one crescent malaria.

Believe nothing that you see in the newspapers — they have done
more to create dissatisfaction than all other agencies. If you see
anything in them that you know is true, begin to doubt it at once.

Up to this time the Hopkins, as is the way with, new and
privately endowed foundations, had been obliged to shift
for itself, and gifts were hardly to be expected from outside
sources until a generation had passed. It consequently
must have been heartening in the face of the unexpected
poverty of the institution, to have the ice broken through
the establishment of a lectureship by a New Yorker, Dr.
Christian A. Herter, who had been one of the early group of
workers in Welches laboratory.^ Hence the following letter :

I West Franklin Street, xi.3.02.

Dear Herter, The splendid gift which you Sc Mrs Herter have so
generously given has stirred us to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It
would have rejoiced you both to have seen Welch’s delight as he
read your letter. It really means a great deal to the School, and it
is so nice to think that our first outside gift came from friends whom
we love Sc appreciate as much as we do you & Mrs. Herter, The
minute of the Faculty which you have received by this time docs
not half express the warmth of our feeling — certainly not of those
of us who are your friends. . . .

Only a few things relating to his professional activity
during the remainder of the autumn need detain us. At a
meeting of the Hopkins Medical Society, on November 17th,
he showed an example of the condition — cyanosis with
polycythaemia ’ — in which he had come to take especial
interest and which has since become coupled with his name
as ' Osier’s disease ’, for though Vaquez had first described
a case of polycythaemia rubra, it was Osier who recognized

^ The first lecturer on the foundation was Welch’s old friend Paul Ehrlich
of Frankfort, and there followed Hans Meyer of Vienna, E A. Schafer,
Almroth Wright, and others.

Aet. 53 One of my Internes 595

it as a definite clinical entityd On November 20th. he was in
New York again, and the next day wrote to C. N. B. Camac :

Find ont how much Doring would ask to paint a good portrait of
Welch. I was in New York yesterday, only for two hours, a hurried
consultation. Sorry I could not see you. I had to come back at
once, as poor Ochsner, one of my internes, is desperately ill with
typhoid.

Tuberculosis was bad enough — but typhoid — how he hated
it ! Until it disappeared there were to be plenty of sacrifices
on the part of those endeavouring to check its ravages.^
Those were days when the wards were full of it, nurses,
house staff, and students all being more or less exposed to
chance infection despite the utmost care ; and when, after
three more anxious days, this promising pupil died, it is
evident from the following notejotted down in his common-
place book after returning home that night, how deeply
Osier was moved :

Death (Poor Ochsner) The oppressive stillness of the chamber in
which he lay dying was made more oppressive by the soft but hurried
and just audible respiration. I sat by the bed holding the poor
chap’s hand & beside me were my two assistants & at the foot of the
bed an angel in white, one of the two who had shared the fight with
us. For three weeks we had worked in hope but in vain. We
silently waited the end with sad hearts & brimming eyes. The
young life so full of promise Sc only just equipped for the race, was
dear to us by the association in work of four years, and the thought
that those to whom the dear man was vital, were far away — intensified
the tragedy of the moment. A strange half frightened look lightened
the apathy of his countenance. Far from his home — far from the
loved one who had watched with pride his career — and —

This was all. It is curiously reminiscent of the reaction he

^ Sir A. E Garrod (Proceedings of the Royal Society^ B, vol. xcii, 1921) has
attached Osier’s name to another disorder. ‘ An hereditary malady [he says],
characterized by multiple telangiectases associated with haemorrhages may
rightly be styled Osier’s disease.’

^ By this time, one epidemic disease at least had been conquered, for
yellow fever had disappeared from Cuba, never to return, unless people
forget and grow careless as they have done with vaccination. On the 22nd
of this Nov. 1902, Walter Reed died of appendicitis, and shortly after, the
U. S. Senate after much debate provided the meagre pension of $200 a month
for his widow ; whereas in one year of yellow fever it was estimated that the
epidemic had cost the State of Louisiana alone $i 5,000,000 and 4,056 lives

Q q 2

Books and the Man

596

Dec. 1902

felt after leaving the deathbed of Miss Fisher, the Blockley
nurse, when he was similarly impelled to write a few
unfinished lines — far different from the message of sym-
pathy subsequently sent to this boy’s parents when he was
under control. But he cannot be left long in this mood.
And that ‘ symptom of the bibliomania not mentioned by
Dibdin ’ provides a diversion, for at this very time there
appeared among other catalogues one from George P.
Johnston of Edinburgh, listing ‘ a series of medical theses by
students from America at Edinburgh University ’, for which
he promptly cabled — ^Johnston replying to ask if he meant all
of them, which indeed he did. Books could be a great solace.

On December 4th, before the New York Academy of
Medicine, he gave an address ^ for which he took as his
motto a quotation from Abernethy : ‘ The Hospital is the
only proper college in which to rear a true disciple of
iEsculapius.’ It was a most timely and important topic,
and of particular significance coming from one who expressed
the desire that his epitaph should read : ‘ Here lies the man
who admitted students to the wards.’ Though he did not
say so, his remarks were really aimed at the conditions then
existing in most of the New York hospitals, into whose
amphitheatres students were admitted by side entrances,
but from whose wards they were barred, ‘ as hurtful to the
best interests of the patients’ — a fanciful objection, as he
clearly pointed out, provided one uses ordinary discretion
and is actuated by kindly feelings. It is hardly necessary to-
day, when much that Osier pleaded for in these respects has
come to pass, to do more than point out how great was his
influence in bringing about the transformation, and he made
this prophecy, that ‘ within the next quarter of a century
the larger universities of this country will have their own
hospitals in which the problems of nature known as disease
will be studied as thoroughly as are those of Geology or
Sanscrit.’

In what may be called the natural method of teaching [he said],
the student begins with the patient, continues with the patient,
and ends his studies with the patient, using books and lectures as

*• ‘ On the Need of a Radical Reform in our Method of Teaching Senior
Students.’ Medical News, N.Y., Jan. 10, 1903.

Aet. S3 No Teaching without a Patient 597

tools, as means to an end. The student starts, in fact, as a prac-
titioner, as an observer of disordered machines, with the structure
and orderly functions of which he is perfectly familiar. Teach him
how to observe, give him plenty of facts to observe and the lessons
will come out of the facts themselves. For the junior student in
medicine and surgery it is a safe rule to have no teaching without
a patient for a text, and the best teaching is that taught by the
patient himself. The whole art of medicine is in observation, as the
old motto goes, but to educate the eye to see, the ear to hear and
the finger to feel takes time, and to make a beginning, to start a man
on the right path, is all that we can do. We expect too much of the
student and we try to teach him too much. Give him good methods
and a proper point of view, and all other things will be added, as his
experience grows.

Little realizing what complications were in store for him.
Osier had accepted, during that month, with some mis-
givings and reluctance, an invitation to give one of the
series of ‘ Lectures on Immortality ’ at Harvard University.
President Eliot had long wished that a physician might
participate in this, the IngersoU Foundation, and two years
before had approached William H. Welch on the subject,
when an exchange of letters to this effect took place : from
Dr. Welch — that so far as he could see Science had nothing
to say upon the subject of immortality ; from Mr. Eliot —
that was just what he wanted him to say ; from Dr. Welch
— that it would not be possible to fill an hour in saying so.

Whether or not Mr. Eliot had forgotten this correspon-
dence does not appear, but the next summer at Seal Harbour
he approached Dr. Welch again with no better result.
Mr. Eliot then threatened to persist until Dr. Welch gave
in, unless he would get some one else to give the lecture
in his place, whereupon Welch suggested Osier. Osier
was written to, and ‘ refused energetically as Mr. Eliot
recalls. A conspiracy was then entered upon, it is said, and
Mr. Eliot was to write to Osier again and was to advise
Dr. Welch, at the same time, that he had done so. Accord-
ingly, a day or two after this second invitation was sent
from Harvard, Dr. Welch dropped in at l West Franklin
Street and the following conversation took place :

W. O. : ‘ Welch, what do you think ? They have asked
me to give the IngersoU Lecture.’

598 Books and the Man Dec. 1902

W. H. W. : ‘ How splendid ; you’re going to accept of
course.’

W. O. : ‘ Splendid ? I wouldn’t think of talking before
a Boston audience on such an impossible subject as Immor-
tality. I have already refused once.’

W. H. W. : ‘Why, you’re a perfect coward. You must
do it of course ; no one could do it better. No one ever
refuses an invitation to give an Ingersoll Lecture.’

W. O. ; ‘ Do you really mean it ? ’ — and the long and
short of it was, the following equivocal letter was dispatched,
and ultimately he was persuaded to accept :

Dec. 19, 1902.

Dear President Eliot, — regret exceedingly that I have again to
decline your kind invitation to deliver the Ingersoll Lecture. The
temptation to accept was very strong, particularly as I have been
collecting data for some years on ‘ this business of death ’, as Milton
terms it, but the winter’s work is now so exacting that I could not
possibly find the necessary time for preparation. If you could give
me a year’s notice on some other occasion, so that I could have my
free summer for the work, I should be only too glad to deliver the
lecture.

It had been an eventful year. Mendel’s law, after forty
years of oblivion, had been rediscovered. The passing of
Virchow in his eighty-first year was the last connecting link
between the old regime in pathology and a new one of which
Paul Ehrlich, to be the first Herter Lecturer, was the chief
exponent. Such benefactions as the Carnegie Institution
and the Rockefeller Institute were calling attention to
the needs of the profession and the means which should
be taken to control disease. Sanatoria for consumptives
were springing up in all communities, and Mr. Phipps’s
donations had helped greatly to focus attention upon the
antituberculosis crusade in which the public was becoming
interested. But on the whole, people were indifferent to
the possibilities which had so inspired Mr. Gates, and their
elected representatives, in consequence, were utterly deaf.

There had been two striking object-lessons, one in
Cleveland, where a bigoted though influential mayor had
opposed vaccination and insisted that disinfection with
formaldehyde could stem a serious outbreak of smallpox
which had occurred there ; another in San Francisco, where

Aet. S3 Public V. Private Enterprise 599

for political reasons all mention of the existence of plague
had been suppressed to such a degree as to jeopardize
the safety of the entire country. Then, too, during the
year the widespread extent of infection from uncinariasis or
‘ hookworm ’ throughout the South began to be appre-
ciated as the chief cause of the filth and squalor among
the ‘ poor-whites ’ in the Southern States. But, if legis-
latures were indifferent, the greater was the need for
private enterprise, and the field was prepared for the
opportunity soon to be grasped by the International Health
Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. In all of these things,
as has been seen. Osier indirectly had no little part.

CHAPTER XXII

1903

THE MASTER-WORD IN MEDICINE

Twenty years ago Baltimore was still sufficiently old-
fashioned for people on New Year’s afternoon to keep open
house, with an abundance of apple toddy, cake, and Mary-
land beaten biscuit, or even a ‘ julep ’ for those who relished
some mint in their nostrils. F ailing this year on a Thursday,
there were quiet days left over for the week-end and one
may imagine Osier taking full advantage of them. He was
writing an address to be given in a few days at New Haven,
but the week’s instalment of journals had come in, and one
of them at least — probably all, for they were soon to be
handed on to the Faculty reading-room — he goes over
from cover to cover. Few things missed his eye — even in
the book reviews ; and the number of postcards or notes
which were left to be mailed when 10 o’clock came is
unrecorded, but there were often a dozen or more. On this
second day of January his reading of the London Lancet
alone led to two of them at all events. The first went to
the editor, as follows :

In tlie Lancet of Dec. 20, 1902, p. 1072, the reviewer of a new
edition of the ‘ Religio Medici ’ states that he cannot call to mind
any editor who has pointed out the similarity between Bishop Ken’s
‘ Evening Hymn ’ and the dormitive which Sir Thomas says he took
‘ to bedward ’. In Gardiner’s edition (1845) there is the following
note : ‘ Compare this with the beautiful and well known “ Evening
Hymn ” of Bishop Ken, and these again with several of the Hymni
Ecclesiae, especially that beginning “ Salvator Mundi, Domine ”, with
which Ken and Browne, both Wykehamists, must have been familiar.’ ^

Having newly familiarized himself with the medical
history of Connecticut in view of his coming address,
another communication had arrested his attention, and in
the Archives of Pediatrics for May will be found an article
by Dr. Hezekiah Beardsley of New Haven, Conn., entitled

^ ‘ Sir Thomas Browne’s Evening Hymn.’ Lancet, Lond., Jan. 17, 1903.

Aet. S3 With Pen in hand 6oi

Congenital Hypertrophic Stenosis of the Pylorus % with
this ^ foot-note by Professor Osier ’ :

Cautley and Dent in a recent paper {Lancety December 20, 1902)
state that the first record of this disease which is now exciting a good
deal of interest, dates back to 1841. The report here given by Dr.
Beardsley of a very clearly and accurately described case schirrosity
of the pylorus ’] is, I think, worth republishing. It appears in the
earliest volume of medical transactions issued in this country,
entitled ^ Cases and Observations by the Medical Society of New
Haven County in the State of Conn.’ New Haven, J. Meigs, 1788.

Thus the record of a century-old observation, together with
its author, was rescued from oblivion. Still another note,
probably traceable to the same evening, was sent to the editor
of the Medical News^ and how many more cards went to the
contributors of the various articles in these and other journals,
as he cleared his desk of them, can only be conjectured.

The occasion of his New Haven address, given January 6th,
was the centennial celebration of the local medical society,
and Osier made what he termed ‘ remarks ^ On the
Educational Value of the Medical Society’. Though
perhaps somewhat less effective than other things he had
written, it nevertheless was included the next year in his
collected addresses,^ by which time he had chosen as the
two prefatory mottoes the verse from the Epistle to the
Hebrews, chapter x : ^ Let us hold fast the profession of
our faith,’ &c., and the following from Jowett’s Intro-
ductions (Dialogues of Plato), which indicates sufficiently
well the thread of his discourse ;

The want of energy is one of the main reasons why so few persons
continue to improve in later years. They have not the will, and
do not know the way. They ^ never try an experiment ’ or look
up a point of interest for themselves ; they make no saciifices for
the sake of knowledge ; their minds, like their bodies, at a certain age
become fixed. Genius has been defined as ^ the power of taking
pains ’ ; but hardly anyone keeps up his interest in knowledge
throughout a whole life. The troubles of a family, the business of
making money, the demands of a profession destroy the elasticity
of the mind. The waxen tablet of the memory, which was once

^ ^ The Significance of Cutaneous Angiomata.’ Medical Neivs^ N.Y.,
Jan. 10, 1903.

2 ^ Aequammitas and other Addresses ’, No. XVII.

6 o2 The Master-Word in Medicine jan. 1903

capable of receiving ‘ true thoughts and clear impressions becomes
hard and crowded ; there is no room for the accumulations of a long
life (Theast., 194 ff.)* The student, as years advance, rather makes
an exchange of knowledge than adds to his store.

The address was an appeal to the practising members of
his profession (among whom the forty-visit-a-day man ’
is most to be pitied) to remember that education is a life-
long business ; that experience is fallacious and judgement
difficult ; and that attendance on a medical society, par-
ticularly one which maintains a library, may prove the
salvation of the man who from success in practice needs to
pray the prayer of the Litany against the evils of prosperity ’
lest he tend towards slovenliness in his methods of work.
Even his foot-notes deserve quoting. One of them reads :

In every age there ‘have been Elijahs ready to give up in despair
at the progress of commercialism in the profession. Garth says in
1699 {Dispensary ) —

Now sickening Physick hangs her pensive head

And what was once a Science, now ’s a Trade.

Of medicine, many are of the opinion expressed by one of Akenside’s
disputants at Tom’s Coffee House, that the ancients had endea-
voured to make it a science and failed, and the moderns to make it
a trade and have succeeded. To-day the cry is louder than ever,
and in truth there are grounds for alarm ; but on the other hand,
we can say to these Elijahs that there are many more than 7,000
left who have not bowed the knee to this Baal, but who practise
caute^ caste et prohe.

And the reader is struck, even if his listeners may not have
been, with the diversity of the author’s reading, for he
begins with an appropriate line from ^ The Autocrat ends
with another from Kipling ; and in the body of the address,
in addition to the Bible, Bishop Butler, Locke, Browning,
Thomas Fuller, and George Eliot in the person of Mrs.
Poyser, all make themselves felt. Osier’s mind was insatiable.
At this very time, as the following letter shows, he was on
another hunt, which will account for his presence in York
the following summer :

From Dr. George A. Auden to W. 0 . York, Jan. ii, 1903.

Dear Prof. Osier, — I shall be delighted to hunt up any facts about
old James Atkinson of York. His Medical Bibliography is, I am

Aet. 53

Dr, Slop and Shandy’s Nose 603

sorry to say, but little known. He was born in 1759, liis father being
a friend of Laurence Sterne who was Vicar of Sutton, ten miles
from here. I have often thought that the Medical Bibliography
reminds one a good deal of Tristram Shandy’s humour. . . . Another
medical celebrity of York has been immortalized as Dr. Slop in
Tristram Shandy. This was Dr. Burton who is buried in Holy
Trinity, Micklegate. I have in my charge as Secretary of the York
Med. Society the midwifery instruments described as the cause of
the deformity of Shandy’s nose 1 We have in York a very good
collection of mediaeval medical works, some very valuable ones.
One I am in hopes of transcribing — a vellum MS. of 14.03 by William
of KiUingholme, I believe unique. If anything should at any time
bring you to England and you could spare a few days for York,
I should be delighted to offer you my hospitality. . . .

Mrs. Osier had gone to Boston shortly after Christmas
because of the illness of a relative, and had returned with
a troublesome cough supposedly due to a cold caught on the
train ; and though exposed to whooping-cough while at
her sister’s, it could not have been apparent as yet, either to
her ^ latch-keyer ’ attendant or to her husband, that she
was in for a long-drawn-out illness :

To Mrs, W, S. Thayer from W, 0 . i West Franklin Street,

I. 18. 03.

Dear Sister Susan, So sorry that I shall have to withdraw the
very kind invitation to tea which came from you this morning thro,
W illiam Sydney but — when he came Mrs O seemed so much ‘ given
over ’ to the effects of Dr Futcher’s medicine that it looked hopeless
for the day, now she has revived & talks of getting up — under
which circumstances, I mean the getting up, it seems more properer
& polite that I (as she would be alone otherwise, & most unhappy)
that I, I say, should stay at home & consequently cannot come.
You will understand. Sincerely yours, W“ Osler. PS. ’Tis not
the invitation that I withdraw, of course, but the acceptance. [On
the envelope, evidently intended for W. S. T., is written : ^ Could
you send me Huchard — ^Traite des Maladies du Coeur.’]

The following two letters tell their own story :

To John H, Musserfrom W, 0 . i. 19. 03.

Dear J. H. Many thanks for the Bowditch. He was a noble old
citizen & the life is well told. I wish there had been a little more
about his Paris days. There has been a proposal made to launch
a National Medical Historical Society. What do you think of such
a move ? It seems a pity to start a new society, when there are so

6o4 The Master-Word in Medicine jan -Feb. 1903

many & when we all have such hard work to keep up our interest in
existing organizations. Whether it should be started — & if so
should it be a section of the Am. Med. Ass. or an independent body —
& of unlimited membership or of limited ? At your leisure drop me
a line. The question has not been discussed openly as yet.

5 " 0 Charles Eliot from W . 0 . Jan. 19, 1903.

Dear President Eliot, — I feel much honoured by your kind and
tempting offer. It would be delightful to spend a winter in Cam-
bridge, quietly thinking and studying, and doing such teaching as
you suggest, but I do not see how it could be managed. I have
talked the matter over carefully with Mrs. Osier and I am sorry to
feel compelled to decline. With kind regards and many thanks,
Sincerely yours.

He had expected to attend a dinner of the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia, of which Weir Mitchell was
again President, on the evening of January 24th ^ at the
Hotel Walton, but it must have become ail too evident by
that time that i West Franklin Street was in for a siege of
whooping-cough, for he wrote to his niece : ^ Aunt Grace
is better to-day — but she has cc?fed & cofed & cofed. Can’t
you hear her whoop thro this writing, it just gave me a
shudder as I heard it. Poor Ike is sure to catch it.’ Revere
did ^ catch it ’ — badly — and ere long he began to tune up
in most brazen fashion. This explains the following, sent
on a card from the University Club of New York, post-
marked February 3, 1903 :

To Egerton Y. Davis Osier Jr., of i West Franklin St., Baltimore.

Dear Bandmaster I hear that you are looking for three good
players for your band. I play the big drum, my son Josh plays the
bugle and my little son Reckcrack plays either the bones or the
kettledrum. We charge a dollar a day (each) with meals included.

^ On the morning of the 24th a notice had appeared in the daily papers
stating that Mr. Carnegie had included among his various donations to
libraries — and one may suppose at Dr. Mitchell’s suggestion — the Library
of the College of Physicians at Philadelphia. His gift of $50,000 was con-
ditioned, as usual, on the raising of a similar sum by the college itself, and
those who attended the banquet will recall that when the formal announce-
ment of this munificent gift was made by one of the after-dinner speakers,
he held up and waved a telegram received that morning from Baltimore,
stating that the first contribution had already been received. The telegram
read : ‘ Congiatulations on the bequest. Put Mrs. Osier and me down for
five hundred.’

Aet. 53 The Whooping-coughers 605

We like scrambled eggs for breakfast, mushrooms for dinner and
buttered toast for tea. We play all day for the dollar, and we sleep
in our clothes in the band wagon. We prefer the horse to be white.
Yours truly, Ezekiel Tomtom.

He had busied himself, meanwhile, with the programme
of the Historical Club for the year, and papers had been
promised by Roswell Park, Walter R. Steiner, E. F. Cordell,
and James Mumford, who gave the first of them, and, despite
the whooping-cough, stayed at i West Franklin Street.
On February i8th Osier was in Richmond, where he gave
a clinical lecture before the College of Medicine, on
Leukaemia,’- and on the 24th he sent one of his many letters
to Chadwick of the Boston Medical Library :

No, I have not Aikin’s Biographical Memoirs, & should like them
very much. I know about the old bird & have his Memoir by his
daughter Lucy. I am sending you Thacher’s Military Journal.
It is the first edition and I had it bound this year at Riviere’s. It is
really a very first-class work & a great credit to the old man. By
the way, Thacher’s Diploma from the M. M. S. is in the hands of
his grandson, Boutelle, of Hampton, Va, who might perhaps leave
it to the library. I have a great many letters about the proposed
Historical Society. Nearly all of the young men are in favour of it,
but I have great hesitation about going into it, as I am so con-
foundedly driven with so many things.

A week later he sent word to a niece : ‘We are having
a miserable time thank you. Poor Ike whoops about 24
times in the 24 hours. Aunt Grace has been much better
lately and is almost over the whoops. Revere keeps very
jolly & joky. Isn’t Bea’s birthday on the 13th? Get
a nice cake and candles &c at Webb’s & order flowers at
Dunlops.’ He does not add that though Revere kept ‘ jolly
& joky ’, his father with his fingers in his ears would some-
times rush from the house, for he could not endure to hear
the boy in one of his bad paroxysms. This went on inter-
minably, as is the way with whooping-cough, but it was
even worse than usual, for Revere would ‘ whoop and put ’,
and went everywhere — to the park or his playhouse —
accompanied by a tin basin and a bath-towel. Finally his
father got a red and a blue pencil for him to keep score —

^ This has got into his bibliography, though it was merely taken down and
published from a student’s notes.

6o6 The Master-Word in Medicine Spring 1903

a blue mark for a ^ whoop ’ and a red one for a ^ whoop and
put Still, there were some cheering things, especially
those derived from book catalogues, and it was at about this
time that the Edinburgh theses for which he had cabled the
previous December must have arrived, to his great delight.
In the sale-list which remains in his library he subsequently
wrote as follows of this purchase :

This Edinboro^ Catalogue here appended came from G. P. Johnston
one Sunday morning while I was still in Baltimore. I cabled at once
for all the American Theses, and secured them (J. cabled me ^ Do
you mean all of them ? ’). The following summer when in Edinboro
I called at Johnston’s and he showed me a group of cables which he
had received. Mine came early Monday morning before the shop
was opened. Then in quick succession came cables from the Surgeon-
General’s Library, Washington, the College of Physicians, Phila.,
the Academy of Medicine, New York, and from Dr Pepper,
Phila. It is a very remarkable collection and came chiefly from the
libraries of the Professors Hope to whom they were presentation copies.
There are the theses of some of the most distinguished of American
physicians, Bard, Archer, Almon of Nova Scotia (the father of
Senator A. and the grandfather of my friend Tom A.), Shippen,
Morgan, Kuhn, Logan of Phila, Ben], Rush, Physick, Arthur Lee
and others, I gave the collection to the Frick Library of the Medical
& Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland.^

One of the first acts of the Carnegie Institution, of which
D. C. Gilman had become President, was to set aside funds
to make possible the resumption of the Index Medxcus
under the editorship of Robert Fletcher. This action was
probably taken at the solicitation of Weir Mitchell and
John S. Billings, both of whom were members of the Board,
for its general policy has been from the outset to leave
medical and public health interests to the Rockefeller foun-
dations and to support research in other fields. Osier and
Welch promptly arranged for a dinner at the Maryland Club
to celebrate the occasion, and many notes like the following
to Dr. H. C. Yarrow issued from i West Franklin Street :

iv. 8. 03.

Dear Yarrow, Are there any special friends of Dr. Fletcher —
other than H. C. Y. — who should be asked to our little gathering
on the 1 8th to commemorate the Index Medicus redivivus ?

^ The 123 Theses were presented at a meeting of the Book and Journal
Club, Thursday, March 26th.

Aet. 53

Thinking of Others 607

Most of the letters of this time which have been recovered
are brief lines relating to matters of this soit : a reception
at the Faculty hall for Dr. Cordell as a mark of apprecia-
tion for his centennial volume,^ which by now had appeared,
a somewhat overgrown and expensive child for the committee
of five who had fostered it ; arranging for another public
meeting in McCoy Hall under the auspices of the Tuber-
culosis Commission ; arranging for a luncheon in New York
for Professor Ewald of Berlin ; for the Laennec Society
meeting ; the post-graduate lectures ; and much else
besides. Not content with the dinner for Robert Fletcher,
he had set on foot a movement for a portrait, and from the
University Club in New York on the day of the Ewald
luncheon, he wrote to J. R. Chadwick :

6th [May 1903]

Many thanks for the Cardan. I had not the volume. It is most
interesting. The horoscope of Andreas Vesalms is excellent —
I found it accidentally. I have just had four of the original editions
of C. from Muller 8 c Co with several treasures. About the Fletcher
portrait — will you stir up the Boston men. I will attack some of
the N. Y. fellows tomorrow Sc next week we can canvass the men in
Washington. Shall you be at the Meeting ? I shall be at the New
Willard. Join me often in the Cafe ! !

The meeting to which he refers was the eighteenth session
of the ^ American Physicians ’ held in Washington on May
1 2th to 14th, under the presidency of his old Montreal
colleague, ^ silent ’ James Stewart.^ Osier had written to

^ The Medical Annals of Maryland, 1799-1879’ Baltimore, 1903.
(Privately printed )

^ It was the year of the Vlth triennial Congress of American Physicians
and Surgeons, over whose geneial sessions W. W Keen presided. At the
combined sessions symposia were held , Fitz, Opie,Flexner, R. H Chittenden,
and Mikulicz of Breslau weie the chief speakers on the subject of the pancreas,
an organ which occupies the region that Osier, before his students, was
accustomed to refer to as ‘ the area of abdominal romance, where the head
of the pancreas lies folded in the arms of the duodenum On the subject
of the gall-bladder there were papers by Ewald of Berlin, Klebs of Halberstadt,
Musser, Christian Herter, W. J. Mayo, and Moynihan of Leeds — later
Sir Berkeley, whom Osier always playfully addressed as ‘ Carnifex Maximus
There were other papers no less notable. Thus at another session, Theobald
Smith and Trudeau made clear that Koch had been rash in his statements
made at the London Congress in 1901, for Smith had succeeded in isolating
the bovine bacillus from the mesenteric glands of a child, and Trudeau had

6o8 The Master-Word in Medicine May-Junei903

Lafleur urging his attendance, stating that the prospects
were good for an exceptional meeting — and such it proved
to be. One of the afternoon sessions was given over entirely
to a symposium on Disorders of the Spleen, and Osier read
one of the more important papers,^ which led to a lively
discussion. That a dinner of the association followed,
which proved unexpectedly expensive for some of the
participants, is evidenced by the following, scribbled
without date, and again from the University Club of New
York, to his friend Chadwick :

Many thanks for the books. The large paper copy of the Religio
I had never seen — tis a fine addition to my collection. I will send
yon the small paper copy in exchange. I have a duplicate
Eiition. I did not know of Jackson’s and letter — though I had read
somewhere of his ‘ Death of Washington ’. We have just finished
the meeting of the Association of Medical Librarians.^ The work is
progressing well. I bagged $250 for the Fletcher portrait at our Assoc,
of Am. Phy. dinner. Garrison writes discouraged from Washington.
I shall stir up some men ‘ at large ’. Will you attack the Boston men.

But he was not permitted invariably to be the host and the
suggestor of tributes to others. Occasionally he was sub-
jected himself, and nothing could have been more spon-
taneous or delightful than the dinner given at the Maryland
Club on the evening of May 15th when a group of the ‘ old
timers ’ at the Hopkins gathered together to make fun of
him and each other ; and on the menu they were recom-
mended among other things to ‘ cultivate the virtue of
taciturnity ’ ; to ‘ remember the words of Publius : “ I have
often regretted my speech, not my silence ” ’ ; and to
‘ read the advice to a young physician by Egerton Y. Davis ’.

produced a relative immunity with an avian bacillus. Both of these studies
indicated the essential identity of the various bacillary groups of tuberculosis.

^ The title was ‘ Chronic Cyanosis with Polycythaemia and Enlarged
Spleen : a New Clinical Entity ' {Amencan Journal of the Medical Sciences,
Phila., Aug. 1903, p. 187). It was a further consideration of the so-called
‘ Osler-Vaquez disease ’ with the leport of additional cases.

^ The meeting, with fifteen in attendance, was held on the morning of
May 1 6th in Brooklyn in the Library of the Medical Society of the County
of Kings, and in the afternoon in the New York Academy of Medicine. Osier
was again elected President and, indeed, was the main source of inspiration
of the Society. The Transactions appear in the Medical Library and Histoi ical
Journal^ 1903, i. 206-21.

Aet 53 The D. N. B. for his Library 609

Late in the evening a procession filed from the club and
marched to i West Franklin Street, trundling barrow-loads
of books to deposit in his library. For the real purpose
of this gathering was a gift — that monument of George M.
Smith the publisher, the sixty-three volumes of the
‘ Dictionary of National Biography ’, completed shortly
before, ‘ after eighteen years of unremitting labour’.

They sailed on May 29th on the Cedric, and the following
letters tell something of their summer ; of a gift from
Henry Phipps ; of a fictitious portrait of Harvey ; of the
aftermath of Mrs. Osier’s whooping-cough ; of Paris,
Guernsey, Harrogate, York, Norwich, Beauly, and London :

To H. M. Hurd, from W. O. Paris [undated]

Dear Hurd, That was a kindly act of Mr. Phipps — and shows
a discerning mind. I have told Brown Shipley & Co. to pay the
money to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and we can determine later what
is best to be done. Either to invest & spend the interest in the tuber-
culosis work or to spend the whole amount in rearranging the Dis-
pensary (which needs it badly) and adding special rooms for the
tuberculosis patients. Making a modest out-patient dept, of this
sort might appeal to Mr. Phipps & he might double his subscription.
In any case it is an encouraging sign and we can use the money to
great advantage. I am here with Emerson & Jacobs. E. has had
a most profitable visit. [Pierre] Marie has been most kind and he
has the run of the Bicetre. We go about July ist to Brittany or the
Channel Islands. Love to all at the Hospital, [etc].

The allusion to the ‘ kindly act of Mr. Phipps ’ deserves
explanation. One of Henry Phipps’s children had been
a patient of Osier’s and he had been to see them from time
to time in New York. Quite possibly on one of these
occasions something may have been said commendatory of
Mr. Phipps’s project to establish an institute in Philadelphia
for the special study of tuberculosis, the-first institution of
its kind, newly established under the directorship of Dr. Law-
rence F. Flick.^ Osier in all likelihood must have told him

^ The Henry Phipps Institute for the Study, Treatment, and Prevention
of Tuberculosis — ‘ the embodiment of a new idea, namely the concentrated
effort upon a single disease for its extermination ’ — ^had been founded on
Feb. I, 1903, and was in operation in temporary quarters at 238 Pine Street,
Philadelphia. After a period of excellent work it was subsequently taken over
by the regents of the University of Pennsylvania.

6 10 The Master-Word in Medicine june-july 1903

of the great importance of the work, and may have mentioned
the conditions which the students in Baltimore had disclosed
in visiting the homes of the consumptives who had reported
at the dispensary. In any event, Mr. Phipps had come to
feel that he would like to do something for Baltimore as
well as Philadelphia. Having acquainted Dr. Flick of this
intent, one evening early in June, when at dinner in Phila-
delphia with the staff of the Institute, he excused himself,
left the table for a moment, and returned with a small
sheet of club stationery partly torn in two, on which he
had scribbled, ^ Pay $10,000 to Dr. Osier, [signed] Henry
Phipps.’ Would you mind taking this to Dr. Osier ? ’ he
said, ^ and tell him that if he uses it well I will send him
more.’ This slip, promptly taken to Baltimore by Dr. Flick,
was forwarded to London by Dr. Welch, where it was
thought to be a hoax, and Brown, Shipley & Company for-
warded it in turn to Paris, where its genuineness and purpose
was recognized. In reply to Osier’s letter of acknowledge-
ment Mr. Phipps wrote : I hear you are married. We
have taken Beauly Castle and hope you will pay us a visit.’

To W. S, Thayer. Hotel de Castiglione, Paris [no date]

Dear Thayer, We had a delightful crossing, pleasant people &
smooth seas. After a week of rain and bustle in London I came on
here and am with the Baron von Jacob [H, B. Jacobs] & Emerson.
Enjoying Paris very much. E. J. & I start out every morning about
9 for one of the Spirals. We have been 3 times at Bicetre with
Marie who is charming and yesterday we saw his collection of odd
& anomalous cases — an extraordinary show. I have been 3 times at
the St Louis & have been going thro the museum carefully. The
trophic & other lesions are remarkable. Dieulafoy we missed &
Debove, but we have heard three delightful lectures by Brissaud
on the forms of oedema & the vasomotor disorders. Norton turned
up yesterday — ^just on from Wien. He seems well & happy. Whit-
man I have seen twice ; dined with him on Friday. ... I shall stay
here for another two weeks.

Was not Mr, Phipps gift a surprise. We should either convert it
& spend the $400 a year in some special way associated with Tuber-
culosis or what I think would be better still devote it to help
reorganize our Out-patient Dept. & make one special part for Tuber-
culosis. We could leave the waiting room as it is & pull down 6c
rearrange all the rooms to the left 6c possibly to the right. This
should not cost more than 20,000 dollars 6c the Trustees should go

A Vernon Medallion

6ii

Aet. 54

shares. . . . Drop a line before long. Do arrange with Smith &
Futcher about the summer dispensary work so as to be sure there
are a couple of men on hand each day. Ever yours, W. O. Send
word of any special French books we should have I have a box
coming out from Welter.

Subsequent letters tell of prowling along the Quais in and
out of old book shops ; of visits with Raymond, Charcot’s
successor at the Salpetriere ; of a supposed picture of
William Harvey by Janssen they had discovered ; and it was
during this sojourn in Paris that H. B. Jacobs had the
medallion by Vernon made of him, to which the following
letter of recent date from Pierre Marie refers :

Je me felicite d’ avoir ete tout au moins Foccasion de Fexecution
de sa medaille par Vernon (notre grand medailliste — mort, lui
aussi). Sir William etait venu diner a la maison avec un de ses
compatriotes, et apies le diner j’avais pense que tons deux pren-
draient peut-etre quelque interet a regarder les medailles des
medecins et chirurgiens connus de Paris ; c’etait alors la coutume
que les amis et les eleves Assent cadeau a leurs maitres de leur
medaille, par souscription, et j’en avais un grand nombre. Sir
William et son ami avaient beaucoup admire les medailles fakes
par Vernon. En nous quittant Fami me prit a part et me demanda
de le mettre a meme de fake faire par Vernon, en quelques jours, la
medaille de Sir William — elle fat tres reussie et j’en fas tres heureux.

7 o Jacobs. Glen View, St. Martins, Guernsey,

July 8th.

Surely the dealers are children of Ananias & of the sons of Belial.
Col. Bramston writes a very nice letter. He knows of no such
picture [of Harvey], never had one & had he had one he never could
have parted with a family relic of such value !

We are most comfortable here — ^the weather is superb & the
bathing first class. The roads are excellent & we have already had
several delightful five o’clock tea picnics in different parts. The sea
& the rocks on the south shore, near us, are very fine, & as in the Isle
of Wight, chines run up from the Coast. Mrs. Osier has been
much better. Yesterday she had a bad attack again — it seems, as
Fowler says, a genuine bronchial asthma following the whooping-
cough. Revere is so happy — he has just had the delightful experience
of sending his cricket ball through a window pane. I hope you will
find weather like this at Trouville. , . .

7 o W. S. Thayer. Guernsey, 15th [July]

Thanks for your nice long letter & for the 3rd year lists &c. I am
glad that some of the men were conditioned & warned — ’twas

R r z

6i2

The Master-Word in Medicine juiy-Aug 1903

needed. Hamman seems an A.i. fellow. We can recommend him
in Sept. tho. properly all the new nominations should come before
the Trustees in June. I am very sorry Calvert has gone to Columbia.
’Twill not be for long. The conditions there are hopeless, I under-
stand. Why the d did he not watt in St. Louis. What a bomb

Flexner’s engagement was ! He deserves a good wife.

I had a most interesting visit in Palis & saw much that was instruc-
tive. Mane was most kind — also Raymond & Dejerine. Mi Phipps
has promised another $io,ooo when needed. We must take this
chance to get the out-patient Dept, thoroughly remodelled, &
a separate Tub. Clinic established. I dare say Mr. P, will do any-
thing we ask. A model 0 -P. Dept, for the disease would be a great
addition. Think over plans. The waiting-room — general, is all
right, but the rooms should be remodelled and rearranged. I have
written to the Trustees about it. We are in a comfortable little
cottage here. I am loafing. — ^We have found a good sailor who
takes us in a big boat three or four times a week. The weather is
heavenly — the coast perfection, & the bathing just right. I am
mahogany coloured. Mrs Osier still coughs & wheezes — there is
a sort of asthmatic condition left — most distressing at times. She
IS better now.

As he says in a letter to H. V. Ogden, they had picked out
^ a quiet little village close to Fermain Bay, one of the
prettiest spots on the Island — an odd corner of the earth —
half French, half English, with queer customs & laws &
virtual independence of government h And from other
letters, to the stay-at-home 3-West-Franklin-Street neigh-
bours, extracts may be taken : j j i

I was much interested about the Harvey picture ; which was
a beauty, but after the positive statements from Cust & Power and
the glaring discrepancy in the date I could not think of it. ... I have
bagged two 1543 Fabricas ! ’Tis not a work which should be left
on the shelves of a bookseller. ... We should get up a lecture bureau
& with a course on the great medical books of the world, Hippo-
crates, Galen, Avicenna, Vesalius, Paracelsus, Harvey &c. — all w^ell
illustrated with lantern slides and the original editions. I am
struggling with the question of the Edttio Princep of Avicenna. . . .
I am deep too in a life of Gui Patin & am interested in his tirades
against polypharmacy & the Arabians Did I tell you I got Harvey’s
letter to Riolan — ^had to pay £ 6.6 for it. R. was Patin’s great
friend & they both scoff at Harvey’s discovery even as late as 1670 !
I shall look up the Harvey portraits. I have stirred up a dozen
dealers to look for the de Motu Cordis. I have got the 2nd 4th &
6th editions of Garth’s Dispensary — they are valuable for the notes.

Aet. S4 Off the Rocks of Guernsey 613

. . . I am reading KussmanPs Docentenzeit in Heidelberg — ’tis not
up to the Jugenderinnerungen but there are some very good pictures
of his early days.

July 25th.

. . . Besides the two copies of the ’43 edition of the De Humani
corporis fabric a I have just ordered a third. We cannot have too
many copies in America & no Medical Library is complete without
one.^ We are having such a nice quiet time here — the weather has
been perfect. Mrs. O. is not at all well — wheezes still like the deuce,
but has been better lately. To add to her discomfort an urticaria of
ferocious quality has landed upon some 3-^ acres of her back. Revere
is very jolly. I wish you could take a header with me about ii this
a m — high tide & about 1 5 feet of water off the rocks. . . .

Osier’s natural courtesy made him choose for correspon-
dence subjects with which his reader would be familiar,
and the morning ^ header ’ described to a young friend was
probably no more exhilarating than his evening ^ header ’
mentioned in a letter written at the end of this same day
to Weir Mitchell, in which he says :

Reading the Ethics of Aristotle this evening in Bk. VII Chaptei V
I came across the statement ‘ there was a man again who, by reason
of disease, was afraid of a cat ’. He is speaking of excessive cowardice.
It may interest you in connection with your inquiry into morbid
dread of ^ the harmless necessary cat

Weir Mitchell had been writing to him of a paper he was
preparing on feline phobias ; but the perusal during that
summer of a new edition of Aristotle’s ^ Ethics ’ (A. S.
Humphries, 1902) indicates possibly that the Ingersoll
Lecture was on his mind. At the same time he must have
been easing his conscience with some literary work, for he
sent a postcard from London on the 19th of August to
Francis R. Packard to the effect that in a few days he would
receive for publication a paper on the ^ Visceral Manifesta-
tions of the Erythema Group A hint of his summer’s
reading, too, is shown by the leading (unsigned) editorial
in the Journal of the American Medical Association for
August 22nd — a delightful and appreciative review of
^ Kussmaul’s Autobiography ’ ; and on the same day the

^ One of these copies was forwarded to the McGill Library, and having
quite forgotten the fact he sent them a second copy from Rome on March 9,
1909.

6 14 The Master-Word in Medicine Aug.-Sept. 1903

London Lancet published an important clinical study ^ On
the so-called Stokes-Adams Disease V ii^ the course of
which there is quoted an observation by Kussmaul in his
^ Aus meiner Docentenzeit in Heidelberg ^

To Chailes W, Eltot» Arts Club, 40 Dover Street,

Aug. 2 1st.

Dear President Eliot, Your letter reached me here a few days
ago. Early in May would suit me best [for the IngersoU Lecture].
I cannot give you the exact date until I hear from Paris as to the
date of the Third International Congress on Tuberculosis which
I have promised to attend. With kind regards [&c]. I shall be
back Sept. 23id.

A letter of the 25 th from Mrs. Osier, Hotel Granby, Harro-
gate, says : ^ This address means that I am here for the waters
and baths. I am ashamed to come home with same old cough
and Dr. Osier insisted that it was aggravated by some gouty
symptoms. So here I am. You would not know me — I am
alone in a very dignified hotel and have assumed a British-
matron dignity and tone that are quite becoming I assure
you. After the freedom of Guernsey it is a bit oppressive.
Revere and Miss Nichols are in Falkirk ; Dr. Osier with the
Schafers in North Berwick — but joins me this p.m. We
hated to leave Guernsey — it was a haven of rest and peace.’
That he so joined her and was in his usual high spirits is
evident from a number of his letters, one of which, written
on the 29th, reads :

1 had a fall in blood pressure of 125 mm. yesterday afternoon.
In an antiquariat’s here I was pulling over some old books (while
Mrs. O was looking at china &c) and on a chair near at hand were
two fine quartos, very finely bound, one the History of the Straw-
berry Hill Sc the other, Walpole’s Noble Authors, the two £1.15.0 !
I jumped on them thinking of Sister Kate Sc Pius IX — but alas the
Delilah in charge knocked me over by saying that she had just sold
them — not an hour before, to Sir Tristram ? ? — Shandy I suppose —
damn him ! ! I was disgusted. But to-day I saw at York [with
Dr. G. A. Auden] the very forceps which smashed Tristram’s Nose
Sc looked at many things about Dr. Burton, the original Dr. Slop. 2

^ In all probability this was prepared for the annual meeting of the B.M.A.
in Swansea, July 28-31, which he failed to attend.

2 At the December meeting of the Johns Hopkins Histoiical Club he gave
a paper on Dr. John Burton, Osier delighted in Laurence Sterne’s book

Aet. 54 At Beaufort Castle 615

Mrs. Osier is drinking the sulphur water & looks like Persephone —
She seems all right again. Many thanks for the Shelley items. I saw
that the Adonais had biought out a record price. I have subscribed
at Sotheby’s for the catalogues of next year so we can cable for
Mrs. Osier when she wishes to make us a present. She gave me
yesterday the Bronte girls’ poems, — a delightful little volume. . . .
Tommy is in Edinboro with Miss Nichols. I go to Norwich on
Monday 8 c then we go to Mr Phipps near Inverness for a few
days. . . .

Mr. Phipps for several years had taken Lord LovaPs
estate, Beaufort Castle, for the summer. It is an exquisite
place, reached from Inverness by skirting the south shore
of the Beauly Firth, and lying in a bend of the Beauly River,
celebrated for its salmon. At Beauly there was a large
house-party, including an Indian prince among others, but
Mr. Phipps promptly fell under Osier’s spell and followed
him about as though charmed. They are said to have been
inseparable, while the other guests went their several
ways.

To Abraham Jacobi from W, 0 . 40 Claiges Street, London,

iith [Sept.]

Please delight the heart of an ardent admirer of yours, Dr. G. A.
Auden of York, Eng. by sending him your photograph. He has
a tough old caricature of you from some paper above his mantel-
piece and I told him that I would write and ask you to send a good
one. I hope that you have had a good summer and that Mrs. Jacobi
is, at any rate, not worse. After three weeks in Paris, I joined Mrs.
Osier at Guernsey where she had taken a cottage by the sea. For
nearly eight weeks we rested Sc fished Sc bathed and had a most
pleasant holiday. We have now returned from Scotland to pack up
our things and get ready for the homeward trip on the loth. I hope
you got Kussmaul’s ‘ Aus meiner Docentenzeit I asked to have
It sent to you in July. ’Tis not up to the Jugenderinnerungen, but
there are several good bits. I have got some treasures — an editio
princeps of Celsus 1478, the most important.

and all its ramifications, especially in the fact that ‘ Dr. Ferriar the dis-
tinguished Manchester physician has exposed the plagiarisms of “ Tristram
Shandy ” in the ‘‘ Illustrations of Sterne” ’ — plagiarisms from another Burton,
the ‘ anatomist ’ of Melancholy ; and in a later article p Men and Books :
No. XXII : ’ Canadian Medical Association Journal^ July I9I3> iii. 612-13)
Osier came to the defence of ‘ Dr. Slop ’, that is of Dr. John Burton of York,
who was ‘ not only a distinguished physician but the author of a celebrated
work, still an authority, on the antiquities of Yorkshire

6 1 6 The Master-Word in Medicine Sept.-Oct. 1903

T 0 George Dock. i West Franklin Street, 25tli [Sept.]

Your letter of the 22nd only reached me at noon to-day just after
my return. We had a delightful trip back, five fine days out of
seven. Revere and Mrs. Osier enjoyed it so much. The latter is
better tho she wheezes occasionally, particularly if she has been
exposed to the wind. She spent two weeks at Harrogate — ^horrorgate
she calls it. The sulphur did her good I think. We went to Scotland
for ten days, part of the time with the Phipps — of the Phila. Phipps
Institute for Tuberculosis. He has twice sent his boys to consult me
& this summer, as perhaps I told you, sent me most unexpectedly
$10,000 to be used in the Tuberculosis work of the Hospital & has
promised an additional $10,000 when called for. Such a man
deserved encouragement so we visited him & found the whole family
most delightful. I have returned laden with treasures for the
Med. Chir. & our J. H. H. Library — a few good things for i W.
Franklin. The day before I left I picked up the 3rd Ed. of the
G. H. Cane (Munk’s Edition) w^hich had belonged to either Risden
Bennett or B. W. Richardson. It is illustrated with no engravings,
&c. What edition of the G. H. Cane have you ? I am trying to
‘ sweat out ’ an address on ‘ The Master Word in Medicine ’ (work, of
course) for Toronto next week. The opening of some new buildings.
I hope you are in good form. Love to Mrs. Dock & the chicks.

The Master -Word in Medicine V one of his more
finished addresses, was being ^ sweated out ’ in preparation
for a festival to be held in Toronto on October ist. There
was to be a double function, for not only were the new
medical laboratories for physiology and pathology to be
dedicated, but, in addition to this, the amalgamation after
years of rivalry of the faculties of medicine of Toronto and
Trinity Universities was to be celebrated. The address,
inaugural of the new laboratories, was given in the afternoon
by Professor C. S. Sherrington, then of Liverpool, in the
amphitheatre of the building ; and in the evening, in the
large auditorium of the gymnasium before the assembled
students, came Osier’s lecture introductory to the session,
on the time-worn subject of the student’s duty to his
college, himself, and the public. As would be expected,
^ from a native of this province and an old student of this
school ’ he paid a tribute to his former teachers — to Bovell
in particular ; and after a reference to his fellow-student
Dick Zimmerman — ^ how he would have rejoiced to see this

^ Repiinted as No. XVIII in ‘ Aequanimitas and other Addresses

Aet. 54 The Master-Word is Work 617

day ! ’ — ^he went on to speak indirectly of himself in the
following way :

It seems a bounden duty on such an occasion to be honest and
frank, so I propose to tell you the secret of life as I have seen the
game played, and as I have tried to play it myself. You remember
in one of the ‘ Jungle Stories that when Mowgli wished to be
avenged on the villagers he could only get the help of Hathi and his
sons by sending them the master-word. This I propose to give you
in the hope, yes, the full assurance, that some of you at least will
lay hold upon it to your profit. Though a little one, the master-
word looms large in meaning. It is the open sesame to every portal,
the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher’s stone which
transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold. The stupid
man among you it will make bright, the bright man brilliant, and
the brilliant student steady. With the magic word in your heart all
things are possible, and without it all study is vanity and vexation.
The miracles of life are with it ; the blind see by touch, the deaf
hear with eyes, the dumb speak with fingers. To the youth it
biings hope, to the middle-aged confidence, to the aged repose.
True balm of hurt minds, in its presence the heart of the sorrowful
is lightened and consoled. It is directly responsible for all advances
in medicine during the past twenty-five centuries. Laying hold
upon it, Hippocrates made observation and science the warp and
woof of our art. Galen so read its meaning that fifteen centuries
stopped thinking, and slept until awakened by the De Fabric a of
Vesalius, which is the very incarnation of the master-word. With
its inspiration Harvey gave an impulse to a larger circulation than
he wot of, an impulse which we feel to-day. Hunter sounded all
its heights and depths, and stands out in our history as one of the
great exemplars of its virtues. With it Virchow smote the rock
and the waters of progress gushed out ; while in the hands of Pasteur
it proved a very talisman to open to us a new heaven in medicine
and a new earth in surgery. Not only has it been the touchstone of
progress, but it is the measure of success in everyday life. Not a man
before you but is beholden to it for his position here, while he w^ho
addresses you has that honour directly in consequence of having had
it graven on his heart when he was as you are to-day. And the
Master-Word is Work^ a little one, as I have said, but fraught with
momentous consequences if you can but write it on the tables of
your heart, and bind it upon your forehead. But there is a serious
difficulty in getting you to understand the paramount importance
of the work-habit as part of your organization. You are not far
from the Tom Sawyer stage with its philosophy that ^ work consists of
whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever
a body is not obliged to do

6i8 The Master-Word in Medicine Oct. 1903

That he should have drawn upon Kipling and Mark Twain
for his allusions indicates in all probability what was being
read to Revere, just as do the references to mythology in
the following passage devoted to one of the several sources
of ^ that foul fiend worry ^ :

Another potent cause of worry is an idolatry by which many of
you will be sore let and hindered. The mistress of your studies
should be the heavenly Aphrodite, the motherless daughter of
Uranus. Give her your whole heart and she will be your protectress
and friend. A jealous creature, brooking no second, if she finds you
trifling and coquetting with her rival, the younger, early Aphiodite,
daughter of Zeus and Dione, she will whistle you off, and let you
down the wind, to be a prey, perhaps to the examiners, certainly
to the worm regret. In plainer language, put your affections in cold
storage for a few years, and you will take them out ripened, perhaps
a little mellow, but ceitainly less subject to those frequent changes
which perplex so many young men. Only a grand passion, an all-
absorbing devotion to the elder goddess, can save the man with a
congenital tendency to philandering, the flighty Lydgate who sports
with Celia and Dorothea, and upon whom the judgement ultimately
falls in a basil-plant of a wife like Rosamond.

But as lie went on to elaborate his theme he lightened it
everyw^here by innumerable allusions from the medley of his
own favourites, old and new :

If you wish to learn of the miseries of scholars in order to avoid
them, read Part i. Section 2, Member 3, Sub-section XV, of that
immortal work, the ‘ Anatomy of Melancholy but I am here to
warn you against these evils, and to entreat you to form good habits
in your student days.

And not only Burton but, from his memory or common-
place-book, the ^ Religio \ the Bible, Milton’s ^ Areopagi-
tica ^ Pilgrim’s Progress ’, ^ Middlemarch ’, and the
Breakfast Table Series are all called upon ; and John
Locke, Plutarch, Carlyle, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, and
the Rev. John Ward ; St. Chrysostom, Montaigne, Jowett,
Grosseteste — and, of course, the recently visited Tristram
Shandy. But there is no need further to analyse the con-
struction of the essay. He urged the students to ^ get
a relish for the good company of the race by daily intercourse
with some of the great minds of all ages ’ ; for many of
you he said, ^ will need a strong leaven to raise you

Aet. 54 Consume your own Smoke 619

above the level of the dough in which it will be your lot
to labour.’

A conscientious pursuit of Plato’s ideal perfection may teach you
the three great lessons of life. You may learn to consume your own
smoke. The atmosphere of life is darkened by the murmurings and
whimperings of men and women over the non-essentials, the trifles,
that are inevitably incident to the hurly-burly of the day’s routine.
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence
the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume
your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those
about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your
complaints. More than any other the practitioner of medicine
may illustrate the second great lesson, that we are here not to get
all we can out of life for ourselves, but to try to make the lives of
others happier. This is the essence of the oft-repeated admonition
of Christ : ‘ He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth
his life for my sake shall find it ’ ; on which hard saying if the children
of this generation would lay hold, there would be less misery and
discontent in the world. It is not possible for anyone to have better
opportunities to live this lesson than you will enjoy. The practice
of medicine is an art, not a trade ; a calling, not a business ; a
calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your
head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do
with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence
of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, the
wise upon the foolish. To you as the trusted family counsellor the
father will come with his anxieties, the mother with her hidden
griefs, the daughter with her trials, and the son with his follies.
Fully one-third of the work you do will be entered in other books
than yours. Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over
the rough places of life, but will enable you to bring comfort and
help to the weak-hearted, and will console you in the sad hours
when, like Uncle Toby, you have ‘ to whistle that you may not
weep ’.

This must suffice. Any student incapable of being uplifted
by an exhortation of this kind is beyond the pale.

One of his old Montreal friends was ill at this time, James
Stewart ; and it took little more than the knowledge of this
to send him flying off as though Baltimore and Montreal
were next door, to give some comfort and encouragement.
Hence a note of October 15th to F. J. Shepherd, which
says : ^ Peterson seems to be off his base about my wandering
about homeless in Montreal. I purposely took my things

620 The Master-Word in Medicine Nov.-Dee. 1903

up to the Royal Victoria, so that I could see Stewart early.
I hope to be up at Christmas time.’ And on the same day
he wrote to C. N. B. Camac : ‘ Glad you like the little
Stevenson. I was in New York last Sunday passing through
from Montreal but I had to hurry to catch a train. I have
been much driven since I got home from abroad.’

During all this time, in Maryland as well as in other parts
of the country, the tuberculosis crusade was being energeti-
cally waged, and many unrelated groups of people were
planning to hold congresses. In Baltimore the movement
was on foot for a tuberculosis exhibition to aid further in
the education of the public. This in part explains the
following letter to Dr. S. A. Knopf, who had sent for
Osier’s criticism a document ^ regarding the forthcoming
congresses over which there was likely to be a great deal of
confusion unless some authoritative group of people took
the matter in hand :

Nov. 25, 1903.

Dear Dr. Knopf, — Excellent in every way ! There is not a word
to alter, and I have nothing to suggest. It hits the nail fairly and
squarely on the head. I feel that we should organize a national
committee which should be composed of good men from each state.
That we could do during the Baltimore meeting. The Maryland
Medical Journal is the one in which the letter should be published.

Osier had promised to give one of a series of semi-public
lectures arranged for by Dr. Flick under the auspices of the
Henry Phipps Institute. The first had been given by
Trudeau in October and Osier’s lecture was scheduled for
December 3rd. On the day before, he wrote to his friend
Musser :

I was awfully sorry I could not be with you all last night, but
I had not my Phipps address written, and I took cold on Sunday,
so I thought it was better to stay at home. You asked me about
something with reference to our work here. Personally I think the
only good thing I have ever done in connection with tuberculosis
(though I have written a good many papers) is the article in my
text-book, which Pepper always said was the best thing I had ever
written. Of our recent work at the hospital, the Laennec Society

^ ‘ American and International Congresses on Tuberculosis and Tubercu-
losis Exhibits for the Years 1904 and 1905.’ American Medicine (‘ Letter to
Editor ’), Dec. 5, 1903, vi. 891-2.

Aet. 54 The Home and Tuberculosis 621

certainly stimulated a great deal of interest, and our hospital and
dispensary records have, I think, in the matter of tuberculosis
improved very much since. We have started a very good special
library of tuberculosis, and this year Mr. Phipps has given us twenty-
thousand dollars to have a special out-patient dispensary for our
tuberculosis cases, &c.

The lectuie, given on December 3rd in the auditorium
of Witherspoon Hall, was entitled ^ The Home in its
Relation to the Tuberculosis Problem and he began in
this fashion :

In its most important aspects the problem of tuberculosis is
a home problem. In an immense proportion of all cases the scene
of the drama is the home ; on its stage the acts are played, whether
to the happy issue of a recovery, or to the dark ending of a tragedy,
so commonplace as to have dulled our appreciation of its magnitude.
In more than 400 homes of this country there are lamentations and
woe tonight ; husbands for their wives, wives for their husbands,
parents for their children, children for their parents. A mere
repetition of yesterday’s calamities ! and if the ears of your hearts
are opened you can hear, as I speak, the beating of the wings of the
angels of death hastening to the 400 appointed for tomorrow. That
this appalling sacrifice of life is in large part unnecessary, that it
can be diminished, that there is hope even for the poor consumptive
— this represents a revulsion of feeling from an attitude of oriental
fatalism which is a triumph of modern medicine. . . . The present
crusade against tuberculosis, which is destined to achieve results we
little dream of, has three specific objects ; first, educational — the
instruction of the profession and the instruction of the people ;
second, preventive — the promotion of measures which will check
the progress of the disease in the community; third, curative —
the study of methods by which the progress of the disease in in-
dividuals may be arrested or healed. The three are of equal impor-
tance, and the first and the second closely related and interdependent.
The educational aspects of the problem are fundamental. Nothing
can be done without the intelligent co-operation of the general
practitioners and of the community, and it is a wise action on the
part of the Phipps Institute to take up actively this part of the
work, and to spread a sound knowledge by lecture courses and by
publications.

In the further course of the address he stated that the
three pieces of work, of the first rank, so far accomplished
in this country were : that of Trudeau in the Adirondacks,

^ Medical News^ N,Y., Dec. 12, 1903, and elsewhere^

Aet. 54 My Ochronotic Friend 623

that one of his old Montreal colleagues was in ill-health.
It reads :

Dear Martin, So sorry to hear of poor Blackader. What a sad
time he is having — Please ask Campbell or Murray — one of the
florists, to send him a fine bunch of roses & let me have the memo.
What an anomalous condition. . . . Love to Bill — tell him I am just
off to Milwaukee to put a bung in Mr Pabst. Yours ever, W. O.
I will look after your endocarditic honeymooner !

It was his first visit to Milwaukee, where his former house-
mate H. V. Ogden had called him for a consultation^ and he
was given a busy day, ending with a special meeting of the
Milwaukee Medical Society, when he made an informal
address on medical libraries. Incidentally there were many
people to see, one of whom had been the source of much
correspondence , and on parting, Osier said : ^ Well, I’ll
have to call you Ogde^v's alkaptonuric friend and my
ochronotic friend much to the gentleman’s amusement.

To Archibald Garrod from TV, 0 . Dec. 18, 1903.

Thanks for your kindness about the Lancet proofs I have just
returned from Milwaukee, where I saw Ogden’s case. He will send
you the full notes. The ochronosis is well marked in the ears and
beginning in the sclerotics. It is interesting, too, that he has slight
pigmentation, brownish in colour, of the conjunctivae. My old
patient returned to town the other day, and I looked him over with
the greatest interest. Since I last saw him all the ligamentous
tissues about the knuckles and the tendons have become of a steel-
grey colour. When he makes a fist the knuckles are bluish-grey
and the joints of the fingers also. The staining of the sclerotics
has become much more marked. A very remarkable point, by the
way, about Ogden’s case is that he has the same curious gait as the
Jackson brothers — a stoop at the hips, with a curious swinging of
the arms. With kind regards and greetings for Christmas and the
New Year.

By this time preparations were actively under way for the
coming tuberculosis exhibition ; and early in December he
writes to Parfitt, who since his recovery had been in charge
of a successful sanatorium : ^ I do hope you and Elliott will
send something representing your work for our exhibit,
I am looking after the literary side of it, and hope to have

^ Osier’s paper on ‘ Ochronosis ; the pigmentation of cartilages, sclerotics,
and skin in alkaptonuria was published in the Lancet^ Lond., Jan. 2, 1904.

624 The Master- Word in Medicine Dec. 1903

a most interesting bibliographical display.’ And on the
15th to J. G. Adami :

As you may have heard, we are to have a tuberculosis exhibition,
here during the last week in January, and are arranging for a senes
of talks each afternoon. I am instructed by the Committee to ask
you to take the hour on Friday, the 29th, at five o’clock. The
exhibition will be in McCoy Hall, and the subject of the lecture is
of course left to you, either semi-popular, in which case we would
invite the public, or strictly professional, in which case we would
invite the physicians and medical students of the city.

As an interlude to all this about alkaptonuria and tuber-
culosis it is pleasant to picture him at home on the Saturday
evening of December 26th, his clinical clerks gone for
the holidays, reading a Christmas gift of a new edition of
Sir Thomas Browne, from which are transcribed into his
commonplace-book a page or two of quotations, among
them a Golden Rule of Confucius which he soon uses in
a paper — ‘ It is a wise rule to take the world as we find it ;
not always to leave it so.’ And still pleasanter to picture
him at play with Revere, now well over his whooping-cough
but not yet recovered from his violent attack of mythology.
The nursery, indeed, was hung with pictures of mytho-
logical heroes, and every late afternoon when he and his
father were not ‘ cutting up ’, having a pillow-fight, or
playing with toy trains, sprawled on the nursery floor, the
two would be making up imaginary tales from the legends
of the ancient heroes. Thus it is that Ulysses en route to
Montreal sends a birthday card, postmarked ‘ New York,
December 27, 6.30 p.m.’, on which was written :

Many happy returns of The Day
to the small Telemachus
Care of Mistress
Penelope
from old Ulysses
on the Island of Aegia

So the last days of the year And him in Montreal giving
a paper before the Medico-Chirurgical Society which in the
’70’s he had done so much to activate and of which H. S.
Birkett at this time was President. Shortly before, the
Montreal correspondent of the Canada Lancet, Dr. Malcolm

Aet 54 What will he do with it ? 625

Mackay, whom he had never met, had sent him a note which
brought in reply a postcard saying : ‘ Yes, I will give you
an abstract. I shall not have my paper ready but shall give
a “ talk ” on our experience here with aneurysm of the
abdominal aorta.’ A small matter ; but Dr. Mackay adds
that ‘ after the meeting there was a reception when I was
introduced by Dr. C. F. Martin ; and although Dr. Osier
had shaken hands with over 200 physicians that night, as
soon as he heard ‘‘ Dr. Mackay ” he said : “ Oh yes,
Malcolm Mackay. I will give you my notes before I leave.” ’
There is no difficulty in accounting for Osier’s popularity
among the profession. At this particular time, a fund for
the purpose having been quietly raised among the McGill
graduates, he sat for a portrait to commemorate his con-
nexion with the University. It was stated in the notice,
sent out by William Gardner asking for five-dollar sub-
scriptions, that ‘ any amount in excess of that required for
the picture will be expended in such a manner as Dr. Osier
shall designate ’ ; and the notice ended, ‘ It is worth the
subscription to see what he will do with it.’

CHAPTER XXIII

1904

THE OXFORD CALL

It was to be a hectic spring — and year. It began with
rumours of Oxford. But this threat of having his equani-
mity again disturbed, as in the Edinburgh episode, became
obscured by the smoke of the Baltimore fire ; by the
ensuing rescue of the hospital and school from their finan-
cial embarrassment ; by the establishment of the National
Tuberculosis Association ; by the Ingersoll Lecture, and
much else besides.

Sir John Bur don Sanderson’s intention to resign from
the Regius Professorship had become known late in the
preceding year, and there had been a good deal of agitation
in regard to his successor. During his twenty years in
Oxford, Sanderson had done much to advance ‘ the claim
of Medical Science to be regarded as a University study
and he and his colleagues, chiefly Francis Gotch, J. S.
Haldane, and Arthur Thomson, being fearful of losing
ground already gained, were desirous that James Ritchie,
the pathologist of their own group, should continue the
tradition. The London graduates, on the other hand,
fearful that the earlier efforts of Acland to instil a new spirit
into Oxford Medicine were not being continued, expressed
themselves as strongly in favour of a clinician, preferably
an Oxonian, and a number of eligible candidates were pro-
posed — Church, Payne, Sharkey, Herringham, Schorstein,
and Theodore Acland being prominently mentioned.

Who first suggested Osier’s name is not certain. There
are several who claim the honour. More than one may have
voiced the idea. But it is certain that Sir William Broad-
bent mentioned the possibility to Mr. (now Sir) Herbert
Warren, who wrote to Osier on New Year’s Day expressing
the hope that he might consider some day coming to take
up his residence in Oxford. Rumours of this must have
reached other ears, in view of the following letter :

Aet. 54 Verify your Quotations 627

From S. Weir Mitchell to JF, O. 1524 Walnut Street, Philadelphia,

13th Jan. 1904.

My dear Regius, — ‘ My Son, verify your quotations ’ — or clarify
them. You say yr. Fracas® is at the end of Examen Poeticum — 3rd
part of Miscel® Poems 1693 — Edited by Dryden. Did he edit himself
or Tate or Fracastorius — No such edition can I find in the Brit.
Mus. Catl. or Watts. An interesting Memoir of Fracastorius is by
Rev. W. P. Greswell 1801. He gives a long quotation fr. the Syphilis
Poems — ^his own translation ? — G. as unlike Tate as possible. I find
no miscel^ of date 1693 — and if Dryden filched Tate or re- translated,
you may find out. However it is an ill wind etc. It sent me to
Johnson’s Life of Dryden — ^where I found that D’s first poem was
on the death by Small Pox of Lord Hastings — His pustules he
describes as ^ rose-buds and — gems ’ etc. at last as stars, so that
finally — being semiconfluent I presume

‘ No comet need foretell his change drew on {sic)

Whose corpse might seem a constellation.’

Is it to be found, that Poem ? And this for you —

^ Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own Mother University.’

This is all until we meet — on 27. I have some very fair hash- trash
stewing. Yrs, [&c.] Remsen writes me of a dinner — and that,
between us, I crave less than a bit of talk with you — over books.

Meanwhile the Oxford graduates had held a meeting in
London, on January 5th, and voiced their opinion in Fhe
Times that ^ the Regius Professorship of Medicine should be
held by a physician who is representative of Medicine in its
widest sense a statement carrying the intimation that
a science-candidate would not receive their support. Boiled
down — and it took some heat — the question was, whether
the Regius should be an active teacher in the Oxford group
who devoted themselves almost entirelytopreclinical studies;
or whether he should be a man chosen because of his wider
professional influence, who could be a link between Oxford
and her medical graduates in London, Both sides felt
themselves in the right. Pamphlets were circulated. The
recommendations of the London group were answered in
turn by a printed letter from those in Oxford.

But even the clinicians were in a quandary, for where
could a man be found willing to forgo, as some one said,
^ the financial rewards to which his abilities entitled him,

s s 2

628 The Oxford Call jan 1904

for a pittance of £^00 a year with a position to keep up
and a high-sounding title ? ’ The President of the College
of Physicians became involved ; the Vice-Chancellor was
waited upon by delegates from London ; it was even feared
that Mr. Balfour might take the matter out of the hands
of the contending parties and present an entirely inde-
pendent nomination for ratification by the Crown. Many
of the people concerned w'ere Osier’s friends, and of the
controversy he must have been aware through the British
journals, but if he had at that time any intimation, except
from the President of Magdalen’s note, that his name had
even been considered, he at least made no mention of the
fact. Indeed, other more engrossing things were happening
in Baltimore.

The Tuberculosis Exhibition was held in McCoy Hall
the last week in January. It had involved an immense deal
of preparation on Osier’s part, for he had been made
Chairman of the Committee on Organization. But Welch
and Osier were endowed with the administrative and social
qualities which ensured the success of any such gathering
which had their support. It is to be remembered that as
an outcome, in part, of Osier’s castigation of the Mayor
a commission had been appointed by Act of Assembly in
1902 for the purpose of studying the prevalence of tuber-
culosis in Maryland and its effect on the economic welfare
of the State. The exhibition was planned to display the
results of the commission’s investigations in such a way as
to make a powerful appeal to the public mind.

It was a well-timed meeting. Though the antituber-
culosis movement was gaining momentum, nation-wide
propaganda regarding the curability of the disease was
needed. To be sure, ever since the time when Brehmer
first established an open-air sanatorium for phthisical
patients in the Waldenburg Mountains twenty years before
the discovery of the tubercle bacillus, people here and
there had agitated such a campaign. Its germ lay in the
old Climatological Society ; the community had learned
through Robert Louis Stevenson about Trudeau and the
cottages in the Adirondacks ; Flick’s work in Philadelphia
was becoming widely known — indeed as far back as 1898 he

Aet. 54 A Crusade gains Momentum 629

had suggested the formation of a national society ; A. C.
Klebs had organized the tuberculosis workers in Chicago,
and there were many other earnest individuals scattered
throughout the country who were similarly engaged.

From a purely local standpoint the exhibition, as a popular
demonstration not only of the sources and extent but also
of the curability of tuberculosis, was successful beyond
expectation. But the meeting had a national character as
well, for it brought together the leaders of the crusade from
all sides. As had been suggested by Osier in his letter of
November 25th to S. A. Knopf, advantage was taken of
the occasion to urge the formation of a national society
of those interested in tuberculosis, in order to harmonize,
if possible, certain groups of little-known people who in-
dependently had been soliciting support, lay and political,
for conflicting congresses. One of them, under the leader-
ship of Dr. Daniel Lewis, was laying plans for an international
congress to be held in Washington in April, in spite of the
fact that an international Bureau Central, an outgrowth
of the Berlin and London congresses, had decided on
Paris for the 1904 biennial meeting. Another, which had
already received government backing through the activity
of its lay-leader, Mr. Clarke Bell of the Medico-Legal
Society of New York, was to be held in connexion with the
St. Louis Exposition in the coming October. Neither of
these movements had received the approval or support
of the leaders in the profession.

Consequently, on the last day of the meeting a conference
of the better-known physicians who were interested in the
study of tuberculosis was held in McCoy Hall. William H.
Welch, who presided, was authorized to appoint a committee,
‘ to consider the conditions existing with regard to the
proposed Tuberculosis Congress and other national anti-
tuberculosis associations in the United States ; also to
consider the formation of a National Committee to repre-
sent this country at the International Congress at Paris.’
In accordance with this motion, V/elch appointed Osier,
Trudeau, Theobald Smith, Adami, Vincent Bowditch,
Knopf, Ravenel, Klebs, E. G. Janeway, H. B. Jacobs,
Bracken, Flick, and Biggs. It was therefore representative

The Oxford Call

630

Feb. 1904

of the best minds in the profession ; and this committee,
as will be seen, met a month later in New York to take
action upon the matters they had been appointed to discuss.
Though much more might well be said of the Exhibition
itself, it must suffice to call attention to the collection of
valuable works illustrating the history of tuberculosis
which Osier had taken such pains to gather together.
Brief mention of this occurs in the following undated note
to Chadwick in Boston :

Yes, I give the IngersoU Lecture in May, the i8th, Science and
Immortality. Eliot says I am a specialist in the subject. So glad
the Fletcher fund is completed. What of the frame — is it also
settled, fin ? Thanks for the pamphlet and in advance for the books.
Our exhibit of the literature on Tuberculosis has been most interest-
ing. Have you a 1543 de Fabrica of Vesalius? Yours W. O.

On Sunday morning, February 7th, Osier had gone to
Washington to see Senator Hanna, who had recently been
taken ill with typhoid fever. He got back in the late after-
noon to find the business section of Baltimore in flames.
He has laconically written in his account-book : ‘ Fire
began at 1 1 a.m. Hurst Building — raged until Monday eve.
It reached to within two blocks of i W. Franklin St and
we were all ready to pack up.’ It was a close call. There
were guests as usual not only at No. i but at No. 3 West
FranHin Street, and in the afternoon every one gathered
in the Osiers’ dining-room, where through the southern
windows the conflagration could be seen approaching. That
Osier, usually imperturbable, was nervous, was evident from
the way he twiddled his watch-chain and exceeded his
allotted number of cigarettes through the anxious afternoon
and evening. A policeman finally came to the dooi and
said the block between Mulberry and Saratoga Streets
near by was about to be blown up and that it was time
they got ready to leave. Brands were already falling on
the roofs in the neighbourhood. A wagon was secured ;
some precious books were put in trunks ; some china picked
out ; some linen ; some clothes. The faithful but agitated
black servants cooked an oyster supper and served coffee ;
Revere was awakened and dressed, and, just as the family
was about to leave, the high wind which had been

Act. 54 The Baltimore Fire 631

blowing from the south all day shifted and turned the
further progress of the conflagration to the south and east.
By 2 a.m. they were notified that there was no further-
danger.

From this devastating fire Baltimore reacted courageously,
and a newer and better-built city soon emerged, but for
a time many individuals and institutions were hard hit.
Among them was the Johns Hopkins Hospital, whose major
properties from which rentals were returned now lay in
ruins in the wake of the fire. Of all this there is little
reference in his letters — except a word, after some days, to
let Trudeau know that ‘ we are doing the Phoenix trick
here ’. And later in the month to F. C. Shattuck in
Boston :

I was perfectly delighted with the Gentle Reader. I have been
much entertained. We have so many fiiends in common that
I almost feel as if I knew the author. We had a devil of a time here
with the fire. We shall be out about 1400,000 at the hospital, but
I daresay aU will turn out well, and we are not worrying specially.

It was not in Osier’s make-up to worry, even though at
this time he had been carrying an extra load owing to
Mr. Hanna’s illness, which required almost daily visits to
Washington. Nor was he one to occupy himself by sticking
coloured pins in maps to follow the progress of the Russo-
Japanese War, which had begun on the day of the Baltimore
fire. He hated wars. But there was one episode with
which he was concerned later in that month, of sufficient
historic interest to deserve the telling. The Canal Treaty
with Panama was ratified by the Senate on February 23rd
by an overwhelming vote, and Roosevelt was to appoint
without loss of time the seven members of the Isthmian
Canal Commission — an army officer, a naval officer, and
five engineers. He was promptly waited upon by a delega-
tion of physicians, whose spokesman. Dr. Welch, tells the
story as follows :

The visit to President Roosevelt relating to Panama Canal affairs
was to press upon him the importance of making Gorgas a member
of the commission, the creation of which had been authorized shortly
before by Congressional action. The members of this delegation
represented various organizations such as the A. M. A., the New

The Oxford Call

Feb .-Mar. 1904

632

York Academy of Medicine, the Philadelphia College of Physicians,
etc. An appointment had been made with the President at the White
House at 12 noon. I was selected to be the spokesman. We passed
through a room crowded with persons waiting to see the President,
and I felt that he must begrudge every minute we occupied, especially
as what I had to say I had previously communicated to him by letter,
and I knew that Leonard Wood had already urged upon him all that
I could say and more. I did not occupy more than ten minutes.
Curiously enough I cannot remember who else was present in the
delegation or whether anyone else spoke, but if Osier and Keen were
there they probably did. . . . When we finished presenting our argu-
ment, wliich altogether could not have lasted more than fifteen
minutes. President Roosevelt began talking to us and continued for
at least twenty minutes, in a very interesting, dramatic and amaz-
ingly outspoken fashion. He told us that he did not frame the law
enacted by Congress, and it did not meet his ideas of what the
situation demanded. He would have pieferred a single director,
who should select engineers, sanitarians and other experts. Instead
of that, he had to pick out seven members to make up a commission
and the law provided that no less than five of these should be
engineeis, without one word about a doctor or a sanitarian. ^ How
can I under these circumstances ’, he said, ‘ put a doctor on the
commission ? ’ He said that he fully appreciated the importance of
what we had told him, and he asked me to go at once to General
Davis and tell him all about Gorgas and the importance of the
sanitary side of the work. He sat down and dictated the letter to
Davis. I wonder if Osier did not go with me to see Davis ? I think
that he must have done so. . . .

The upshot was that Gorgas, then only a Major in spite of
the record behind him of having rid Havana of yellow
fever, went to Panama as a subordinate sanitary officer —
not as a commissioner with powers of independent action.
The old scandal of ^ a life given for every tie ’ in building
the Panama railway was likely to be repeated. When
Gorgas demanded screens he was told that shovels were
what was needed, and there is many an unnecessary tomb-
stone dating from the early days in the Canal Zone in
consequence. All manner of difficulties were put in his
way. Indeed, an effort was finally made to have him
removed altogether, and it was not until Roosevelt’s per-
sonal visit to the canal a year or two later that he fully
realized for what Welch, Osier, and the others had been
appealing. Not until then was Gorgas made a member of

Aet. 54 Remembering a certain Letter 633

the commission, and the President wrote to his former
Secretary of War, Elihu Root, saying that if there were
only more unselfish and public-spirited men in the country
like Welch and Osier willing to advise him, his executive
life would be simplified.

As already stated, the probability that the Baltimore fire
might seriously curtail the work of the hospital did not
appear to disturb Osier’s equanimity. There were possible
ways out, and remembering a certain letter of March 4,
1902, telling how his Text-book had so interested certain
people with large funds at their disposal that an Institute
for Medical Research had been founded, he ventured to
write to Mr. Gates to learn whether John D. Rockefeller
might be induced to come to the aid of the Hopkins in its
embarrassed condition. In response, Mr. Rockefeller sent
to Baltimore his personal representative in his benefactions,
Starr J. Murphy, who made a survey of the hospital and an
accurate calculation of its losses, with which information
he returned to New York. Meanwhile, Osier sent the
following characteristic note to the President of the Hospital
Board :

7. m. 04.

Dear Judge Harlan, In case we do not get a supplementary
endowment for the Hospital I shall be very glad to place my salary
( years at the disposal of the Trustees to be used in

maintaining our publications. Please say nothing of it outside of
the Committee. Sincerely yours, &c.

The purport of Mr. Murphy’s visit must have leaked out,
if one may judge from a letter to Mr. H. M. Hanna written
the same day. Mr. Hanna was a brother of the Senator
and an equally remarkable man, with whom Osier had come
in contact even before the Senator’s fatal illness. He was
a friend of many doctors : indeed, had leanings towards
the profession which in his father’s footsteps he had once
intended to follow. He was himself a great benefactor of
Medicine in his own community at Cleveland, where he
had been a former business associate of John D. Rockefeller
and Oliver H. Payne, both of whom he had influenced in
their benefactions in the same direction. ‘ Mel ’ Hanna,
as he was known among his intimates, passed his winters in

The Oxford Call

634

Mar. 1904

Georgia, where he was accustomed to go about with Osier’s
^Practice’ under his arm prescribing for the negioes on
his plantation who might be ill. Hence Osier’s title :

To H. M. Hanna from W. O, 7, iii. ’04.

Dear Dr. Hanna, I do hope the ‘ Sun ’ may be right. We have
no news so far. Mr. Rockefeller has sent for full information as to
our funds &c. We shall be ‘ out ’ about $60,000 a year. It is interest-
ing to note the spirit of loyalty shown by the Doctors & Nurses.
There have been many offers of salaries on the part of officials of
the Hospital & many nurses have offered to come back & take wards
for 3 to 12 mos, without any pay. With kind regards Sincerely
yours, W“^ Osler. Thanks all the same for your kind letter & for
your congratulations to Mr. Rockefeller.

Betweentimes, the hospital life went on as before :
classes continued ; Ehrlich came and gave the first of the
Herter Lectures series on the new subject of physical
chemistry ; H. B. Jacobs, one of the ^ latch-key ers ’ of
3 West Franklin Street, got married; Flexner was called
to the new Rockefeller Institute ; new patients came and
went ; even old ones were not forgotten. Whenever the
memory of some one passed into Osier’s mind, off went
a note or a postcard : 1 1/3/04

Dear Mrs, Curtis, We have come to the conclusion that it is
time you returned to Ward C. We means your entire staff including
several of the men on the Surgical side, I am sure your storage
batteries need re-charging & six weeks — say April 15 to June 14 —
would be a most favourable time. Dr McCrae was never in better
form 6c Dr. Howard has an additional experience which would be
most invaluable in your case. At present he is devoted to a St Louis
widow stowed in Ward B. under my guardianship ! Someone
showed me a photograph of a lady said to be you with two chicks,
but there was a mistake. ’Twas an elder sister of the chicks I know !
I hope you keep in good form, but if you feel the slightest inkling
of relapse — return — there is danger in delay. Yours (on behalf of
the staff) most sincerely, W“^ Osler.

Or in place of a note or a postcard it would be flowers,
a book — even a barrel of apples to Pierre Marie, who declares
they are the best in the world : ^ Quel admirable pays que
celui ou les pommes et les hommes sont aussi excellents ! ’
What happened as the outcome of Mr. Murphy’s survey
is well known. Early in April came a letter from John D.

Aet. 54 The Tuberculosis Tangle 635

Rockefeller, jr., to Osier, stating that ‘ in view of the high
work which the hospital and medical school are doing in
medical instruction and research, including the training
of nurses, which work he understands will otherwise be
materially curtailed because of losses, my father will give
$500,000 to Johns Hopkins Hospital.’ To this Osier
replied : Friday eve.

Dear Mr. Rockefeller, Your letter brought joy to us all, not
only to those of us immediately cormected with the work of the
Hospital, but to all the citizens. Indeed to a larger circle, as shown
by the letters & telegrams which we have received, it has given the
liveliest satisfaction. Please express to your father my sense of the
deep appreciation of his generosity With kind regards, [&c.]

While all this was going on, the muddle among the
tuberculosis experts had come to a head. Into this Osier,
as Chairman of the recently appointed committee, had been
unwillingly drawn. It would appear that he was in favour
of joining forces with the Lewis faction ; to this Dr. Flick
was utterly opposed, and threatened to withdraw the
support of the group at the Phipps Institute unless an
entirely new and third organization was formed. The
committee which had been appointed by Welch at the
Baltimore conference was brought together, on February
27th, at a dinner given by Osier in New York. They agreed
upon a number of delegates who should represent the various
groups of people and institutions interested in tuberculosis,
and adjourned to meet again a month later. Subsequently,
Dr. Flick suggested that this next meeting, one of actual
organization, be held in Philadelphia on March 28th, on
which date Maragliano, an Italian, was to give one of the
series of addresses arranged by the Phipps Institute. A vast
deal of correspondence passed. The position taken by
Welch and Osier is evident from their letters to Dr. Fhck :

I do not see at all [Osier wrote, March. i8th], if the organization
of the Lewis Congress is practically handed over to us, what possible
reason you could have for keeping out. A third organization is out
of the question, and enough good leaven can be inserted into the
present dough to make a really good loaf. What would you propose
as an alternative? We ought to have the matter pretty definitely
settled among us before the meeting, or there will be no end of
confusion.

Mar.-May 1904

636 The Oxford Call

And Welch a few days later wrote :

I understand your position with reference to the Bell and Lewis
Congresses. The Bell affair is absolutely out of any consideration.
The question is whether the Lewis Society is as bad as you think
it is. I confess that I do not know much about it, but it has the
support of men who will have to be reckoned with on account of
their official positions as for other reasons in a National Crusade
against Tuberculosis, and whom it would not be desirable to alienate.
The organization seems to be almost inchoate, and probably could
be moulded into any desired form by those who took hold of it.
It is too bad that there should have arisen such a muddle, and
possibly the best couise may be to let the troubled waters settle
before the leading men in the profession take any positive course
of action. I feel that men like you and Trudeau who have given
strength and direction to the antituberculosis movement in this
country should have the main say in determining what it is best to
do under these circumstances.

At the last moment Maragliano cabled that because of
ill-health he would be unable to appear. Nevertheless the
meeting was held, with Osier in the chair, and sixty-five
of the most eminent tuberculosis workers in the country in
attendance. After some heated discussion, the motion made
by Dr. Flick, that a United States Society for the Study of
Tuberculosis be organized, was carried. Though it was
contrary to his judgement, as would appear, Osier submitted
with good grace to his defeat and, as Chairman, appointed
a committee of five, consisting of Trudeau, Biggs, Flick,
Welch, and Sternberg, to prepare a constitution. This
committee met a month later in New York, when a board
of directors was chosen ; these gentlemen in turn met on
June 6th at Atlantic City, where Trudeau was enthusiasti-
cally elected the first President of the new society, with
Osier and Biggs as Vice-Presidents ; and Osier was also
made Chairman of the International Committee empowered
to represent the society in accordance with the constitution
of the International Central Bureau.

As the Baltimore years rolled on he had become more and
more overwhelmed with strictly professional work, and in
this spring of 1904 it had almost reached the breaking-point.
Recognized from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, from Nova
Scotia to California, as the doctor’s doctor, even though he

Aet. 54

The Doctor’s Doctor

637

might curtail the number of ordinary professional consulta-
tions this could not be done when some member of a
physician’s immediate family was concerned. Love of his
profession meant love of his professional kind^ and the
afternoon was rare indeed that some doctor from somewhere,
ill himself, or with an ailing child or mother or wife, was
not in his consulting-room — what is more, at tea or at his
hospitable table, or both. Much of his treatment was
psychotherapeutic, and though he thoroughly despised the
chicanery of psychoanalysis his personality was such that
he could effectively administer at a single session common-
sense advice which was usually followed. ‘ She has been
worried and apprehensive [he wrote to a patient’s doctor]
over the possibility of a third operation on her stomach.
I have urged her to take more food, to live out-of-doors,
and to keep her mind out of her bread-basket.’ And this
to a neurasthenic doctor : ^ It is very satisfactory to feel that
you have got a good grip on your grey cortex. Go slowly
and attend to your work, live a godly life, and avoid mining
shares. I doubt if quinine could have very much influence.’

^To C. F. Martin of Montreal. Sunday.

Dear Martin, I shall twist my Fraulein’s neck ! She is a daughter
of the Philistines. I suppose she thot (Lord Strathcona’s usage, to
be adopted by the Dept, of Eng. at McGill so Pr, Pet. [Principal
Peterson] informs me !) you were in the Ass. of Am. Phy. list. I am
sending them with my own hand, with inscription &c. so your
forgiveness I know is assured. Is your name up for A A P ? I asked
Stewart about it. I hope Billy Francis is working well. He knows
more about Astrophel & Stella than amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
I have not sent your bill yet to those Cincinnati people. I will
enclose it with mine — they are well to do, but the poor soul is ^ in
the dust Yours, &c., W"” Osler. Love to Hamlet. Campbell H.
is a great success. Working like a Trojan.

Fo John H. Mvsser. r/5/04.

Dear J. H., How the deuce do you find time to make such good
revisions? I have just been reading the section on Blood pressure
in your New Edition. Many thanks for it. ’Tis a bully book
& a great credit to you. I have been swamped with work lately —
& the wards are surcharged — ^we reached a high water mark in the
private rooms — 30 this week. Nine cases of pernicious anaemia in
the house since March ist & three cases outside — ’Tis epidemic !
Hope to see you in Washington next week. Yours W. O.

638 The Ingersoll Lecture May 1904

Indeed, his being so swamped had much to do with a
momentous decision soon to be made. With all this
pressure upon him the date of the Ingersoll Lecture was
approaching, and though he had been making notes and
giving thought to it during the preceding months there had
been scant time for the sort of preparation the subject, once
entered upon, really deserved. He, indeed, had agonized
over it perhaps more than any of his previous addresses and
it was rewritten and redrafted many times. The following
letter to the Dean written at this time not only mentions
his expected absence but dwells upon other matters which
give an idea of the meagre salaries of clinical teachers of
twenty years ago :

7 o W, H. Howell from W. 0 . Baltimore,

May 14, 1904.

I have to go to Boston next Wednesday, to give the lecture on
^ Science and Immortality ’ which Welch has so kindly written for
me. There are one or two things which I wish you would bring
up at the Faculty Meeting :

In the first place, Futcher who is Associate Professor of Medicine
and does a great deal of work, and good work too, has a beggarly
salary for that position : $300. Do you not think it could be in-
creased to some decent rate? He does a great deal of teaching, and
he ought to get at least $700 ; but whatever the Committee thinks.

Secondly, if there is no objection I should like to have some of
my Instructors in Medicine lifted to the rank of Associates : Rufus I.
Cole, Thomas R. Brown and L, P. Hamburger. They have been
doing good work for some years.

Thirdly, would you please talk to Abel about McCrae and the
question of practical therapeutics. McCrae leaves the house this
year. He is a very valuable man, a good teacher, fond of materia
medica and therapeutics, and could, I think, add greatly to the
strength of the section if he could be appointed on the therapeutical
side in clinical therapeutics, either as an Associate Professor or what-
ever Abel thinks, and take charge of systematic instruction in the
third and fourth year in out-patient and ward therapeutics. It is
a weak point in our teaching which I am sure he could strengthen
with great advantage. We need not pay him much salary at first.
I should think five or six hundred dollars a year would be sufficient. . .

There is hardly any place but Harvard that could have
been left a bequest of $5,000, the income to be devoted to
an annual lecture on ^ The Immortality of Man \ Given
such a bequest, there is hardly any place but Harvard,

Aet. 54 Immortality of Man 639

under a president like Charles W. Eliot, which could have
kept such a lectureship going. Osier’s predecessors in the
Ingersoll Lectureship series had been George A. Gordon,
William James, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Josiah Royce, and
John Fiske — a theologian, a philosopher, a philologist, a
psychologist, a historian. How Osier was captured as the
sixth lecturer has been told.

As Welch had said in refusing the lectureship, ‘ science
has nothing to do with immortality ’ ; and after Osier’s
lecture Mr. Eliot expressed himself as greatly disappointed,
for instead of hearing a scientific discourse on the subject,
if there could be such a thing, he had listened merely to
a brilliant and charming essay. Indeed, the lecturer in an
early paragraph had shifted the burden on to the shoulders
of his ‘ lifelong mentor ’ :

One of my colleagues, hearing that I was to give this lecture, said
to me ; ‘ What do you know about immortality ? You will say a few
pleasant things, and quote the “ Religio Medici ”, but there will be
nothing certain.’ In truth, with his wonted felicity, my lifelong
mentor. Sir Thomas Browne, has put the problem very well when he
said ; ‘ A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the
state of this world might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the
next, whereof methinks, we yet discourse in Plato’s denne — the cave
of transitive shadows — and are but embryon philosophers.’

The only portion of the address that met with Mr. Eliot’s
genuine approval was the brief reference to the study Osier
had made of the last sensations of the dying. For the head
nurses in the wards had taken down at his request, for some
time, the exact words of dying patients. ‘ The great
majority gave no sign one way or the other : like their birth
their death was a sleep and a forgetting.’ Raised in a rectory,
destined in his early days for the ministry, conversant as
few men of his time with Holy Writ, a thorough-going
Christian, to stand before a lay audience and discuss with
frankness, clear sanity, and kindliness of spirit whether
‘ mankind’s conquest of nature has made the individual
more or less hopeful of a life beyond the grave ’ must have
been an ordeal. Some said afterwards that he offended
neither side ; others that he offended both. But as to the
brilliant quality of the essay there could be no doubt. The

640 The Ingersoll Lecture May 1904

Athenaeum, in a review of the series as a whole, referred to
them as superb examples of the art of lecturing, but added
that, of the six. Osier’s was ‘ the most common-sense and at
the same time the most literary He made as a framework
the triple classification of mankind into the Laodiceans
who accept a belief in immortality, yet live their lives un-
influenced by it ; the Gallionians who put the supernatural
altogether out of their lives ; and the Teresians with whom
this faith is the controlling influence. In his conclusion he
thus addressed himself to the young men in the audience :

As perplexity of soul will be your lot and portion, accept the
situation with a good grace. The hopes and fears which make us
men are inseparable, and this wine-press of Doubt each one of you
must tread alone. It is a trouble from which no man may deliver his
brother or make agreement with another for him. Better that your
spirit’s bark be driven far from the shore — far from the trembling
throng whose sails were never to the tempest given — than that you
should tie it up to rot at some Lethean wharf. On the question before
us wide and far your hearts will range from those early days when matins
and evensong, evensong and matins, sang the larger hope of humanity
into your young souls. In certain of you the changes and chances of
the years ahead will reduce this to a vague sense of eternal continuity,
with which, as Walter Pater says, none of us wholly part. In a very
few it will be begotten again to the lively hope of the Teresians ;
while a majority will retain the sabbatical interest of the Laodicean,
as little able to appreciate the fervid enthusiasm of the one as the cold
philosophy of the other. Some of you wHl wander through all phases,
to come at last, I trust, to the opinion of Cicero, who had rather be
mistaken with Plato than be in the right with those who deny alto-
gether the life after death : and this is my own confessiofdei.

It was not a particularly well-delivered address. Osier
did not shine in this regard, and though dignified, was
without oratorical bearing on a platform. On this occasion
his wife, who sitting with her mother and among her own
people was a distinctly agitated member of the audience,
is said to have remarked that she ‘ wished Willie would not
rub the calf of his leg with his other foot to stir up his ideas ’.
But even if this were true, probably no one else observed it.
At an informal reception after the lecture President Eliot
mentioned in the presence of Mrs. Revere that her son-in-
law seemed to have a great reluctance to come and live
among his relatives, whereupon Osier quickly replied that

Aet. 54

An oflFer from Harvard

641

it was Mrs. Osier who objected. What for a year or more
had been lurking in the President’s mind is explained by the
following letter :

To F, C. Shat tuck from President Eliot Harvard University,

May 23, 1904.

The Corporation would like very much to get Dr. Osier of Johns
Hopkins to spend one year at Harvard — that is, from October ist
to June 1st or July 1st — on the endowed professorship of hygiene
which is waiting to be filled. The professorship has been established
for the benefit of the students in Cambridge and not as a Medical
School professorship. The incumbent is supposed to advise and
generally befriend the students in Cambridge, to give some lectures
but not many, to act as a consulting physician among them on
occasion, but not ordinarily to practise among them or to give stated
instruction either in Cambridge or at the Medical School. He would
be free to do any hospital work which seemed to him desirable, and to
act as a consultant anywhere.

The duties of this professorship are really to be invented ; and
that is a strong reason, in the minds of the Corporation, for getting
Dr, Osier to hold the Chair for a year. When he was in Cambridge
to give the Ingersoll Lecture I talked with him on the subject, but
found that on account of his great interest in developing clinical
instruction he would bring himself with difficulty to leave even for
eight or nine months his opportunities at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
... It occurred to me, after I had talked with him, that he had some
hesitation about coming to Boston temporarily with freedom to act
as consulting physician, lest he might interfere with the practice of
some Boston physician. Could you not relieve him entirely of this
apprehension, and therefore persuade him to undertake this peculiar
and interesting job as a pioneer and inventor ? . . .

He would have been an ideal person for such a free-lance
position, the duties of which were ^ to be invented What
he subsequently made out of his position in Oxford was just
what Mr. Eliot felt was needed at Harvard. And before
leaving this account of the Ingersoll Lecture it may be said
that the honorarium thereof was donated to the Boston
Medical Library for the purchase of some much-needed
show-cases in which a few of the bibliographical treasures
Chadwick was gathering might be laid out for display in the
O. W. Holmes reading-room.

Dear Musser, Just back from Boston. I leave on Tuesday next.
I have promised to go to the country next Sunday, a patient of
Guiteras & an old patient of yours from Havana is here. Guiteras

2923.1 T t

The Oxford Call

642

June 1904

wishes you to see him also. He came last eve. I have not yet seen
him. Will let you know 8 c if you come down arrange to spend the
night. Your address is A.i. Get it into the hands of the Hospital
Managers. Have your secretary make out a list. They are the people
to attack. Yours, W. O.

It was Musser’s year as President of the American Medical
Association and he must have submitted his address on
^ Some Aspects of Medical Education ’ for Osier’s criticism.
It was indeed on Osier’s favourite theme : that every
hospital should function as a school. The meeting, which
was held in Atlantic City, June 7~io, brought out what was
then regarded as a record attendance of over 2,000 members.
On the preceding afternoon, of Monday, June the 6th,
Osier presided as usual at the meeting of medical librarians,
and as a body they dined as his guests at the Hotel Traymore
that evening. On the same day the delegates of the new
Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis
met as appointed, with Osier again in the chair. Of this
meeting the following incident is recalled by W. H. Bergtold
of Denver :

Among many topics relating to the function and scope of the new
organization, mention was made of the spread of the disease among
the blacks, and the question had been raised of including coloured
people in the membership. To this a Southern physician made
answer, repeatedly referring to the black race as ^ niggers ’. When
it came time to close the discussion, Osier made appropriate remarks
on the various matters which had been brought up, and in alluding
to the admission of coloured members he was obliged to refer to the
physician who had used the term ^ nigger Not knowing, or having
forgotten, this gentleman’s name he hesitated just a second, and then
quickly said with his kind smile and characteristic good humoui :
‘ Oh, you know. I mean my melanotic friend,’ which brought down
the house, the Southern physician included.

The story of the Regius Professorship, interrupted by the
Baltimore fire, may now be resumed. The impasse was
broken when two names, those of Sir Patrick Manson and
Dr. Osier, had finally been suggested to the Prime Minister
as eligible candidates outside of the University circle ; and
Balfour must at once have written to Burdon Sanderson,
who had been away on a long vacation because of ill-
health, Professor Thomson meanwhile acting as his deputy.

Aet. 54

The very Man ! 643

Sanderson apparently had never considered his old pupil as
a possible successor, and Osier’s earlier refusal to stand for
the Edinburgh position was supposed to be due to his
unwillingness to comply with the traditional regulations
concerning testimonials. This, however, for a Crown ap-
pointment was not required, and no sooner was his name
mentioned to Sanderson than he clapped his hand to his
forehead and said, ^ That ’s it — the very man ! ’

To W. O,from Sir John Burdon Sanderson. Oxford,

June 8, 1904.

Dear Professor, — You are no doubt aware that I am on the point of
vacating the Regius Professorship of Medicine here. The appoint-
ment of my successor is in the hands of the Prime Minister (Mr.
Balfour) who in this matter acts independently of the University.
He appears at present to be unable to decide on the proper course to
be taken. My colleagues and I have placed before him our opinion
in favour of appointing our ^ Reader in Pathology ’ who is also Director
of the Pathological Laboratory, he being in our judgement a man of
higher scientific position than any one to be had in the United Kingdom
at present. It appears, however, that certain objections have been
suggested to Mr. Balfour which from a statesman’s point of view have
value, however groundless they may seem to us.

This being the position of matters, it has seemed desirable to
communicate to the Minister our hope that if, for the reasons referred
to, he is unable to take the course we suggested several months ago,
he should as the next best course ask some distinguished representative
of the science of Medicine, outside of this University, to consent to
occupy the position. I now write to ask you whether we may venture
to entertain the hope that you might be induced to accept the
position if it were offered to you.

I think I should add that my only reason for resigning my post is
that declining health and strength make me unable to do the work
efficiently. As you will see from the paper sent by this post the work
is very light. The Regius Professor need not reside more than one-
third of the year, so that he can, if he likes, avail himself of the
proximity of London for any work or purpose that may require his
presence.

I understand that you are to be in Oxford at the meeting of the
B. M. Association. Will you and Mrs. Osier be our guests ? You
would find my house conveniently situated for the business of the
meeting. I would have written sooner but I have been ill and have
only lately found myself in a position to make any arrangements.

The story may be continued by the following account

T t 2

The Oxford Call

644

June-July 1904

supplied by Lady Osier, who at this juncture was visiting
her mother ;

As we never paid any attention to birthdays, I was surprised to
hear that W. O. would arrive at Canton, Sunday morning, June 19,
1904, to be with me on my birthday. Revere and I were then on our
way to Murray Bay where we had taken a cottage for the summer,
Ned Revere drove Revere and me to meet the early train from Boston.
A twinkle in W. O.’s eye made me feel something unusual was in the
air. He sat on the back seat with me. Directly we started he thrust
a letter into my hand and placed his finger on his lips to signify
I must not exclaim. It was Sir John Burdon Sanderson’s letter
suggesting his appointment as his successor to the Regius Professor-
ship at Oxford. As I read the letter I felt a tremendous weight lifted
from my shoulders as I had become very anxious about the danger
of his keeping on at the pace he had been going for several years in
Baltimore. When we reached the house, Mother was on the verandah
and there was no moment for explanation. Immediately after
breakfast we went into the garden alone, and I said : ^ Thank
Heaven, relief has come ; but unfortunately the telegraph-office is
closed here on Sunday and we cannot cable your willingness to be
a candidate.’ He jokingly reproached me for my readiness to leave
America, and returned to Baltimore on the night of the 20th, sending
the cable as he passed through Boston, telling Sir John he would
consider it, and discuss the matter when he reached Oxford,

Str J, Burdon Sanderson from W. 0 . i West Franklin Street,

[Tuesday June] 21st.

Dear Sir John, — I feel highly flattered that my name should be
mentioned in connection with the Chair. I am sorry that so good
a man as Ritchie should be passed over. There are so many things
to be considered that I cabled you asking if an immediate decision
was wanted or whether I could confer with you upon the question in
Oxford. In many ways I should like to be considered a candidate.
While very happy here and with splendid facilities, probably unequalled
in English-speaking countries, I am over-worked and find it increas-
ingly hard to serve the public and carry on my teaching. I have
been in harness actively for thirty years, and have been looking
forward to the time when I could ease myself of some of the burdens
I carry at present. With the income from my book we have a com-
fortable competency, so that I am in a measure independent. My only
doubt relates to the somewhat relative duties of the Chair. I am
interested in clinical teaching, am fond of it and have acquired some
degree of aptitude for bedside work which gives me a certain value
in the profession. I should miss sadly the daily contact with the
students, unless I could arrange for clinical work in London. On the
other hand, I have a mass of unfinished literary material on hand

Aet 54

’Tis Time to Quit 645

which the academic leisure of a new place would enable me to
complete. Thanks for your kind invitation. Mrs. Osier does not
accompany me. I have already accepted an offer from the Dean of
Christ Church. . . .

The following note written the same day to Lafleur
intimates in a brief sentence what is on his mind :

Dear L. So glad to hear that you had a good rest & a profitable
trip. I am working hard this spring — ^good p.g. class 8 c have stood the
work very well considering that it is my 30th consecutive session,
’Tis time to quit ! I go to Boston on Tuesday to get the LL.D. at
Harvard. Then on to Montreal on Wednesday eve. Look out for
me Thursday. I shall lunch with you D V & take the boat to
Quebec in the eve, McCrae goes out of the house in July. He,

C Sc I sail July i6th for a short run. Mrs. O was afraid to risk

the damp See after her sad experience last summer with the asthma.
Yours ever, W. O.

On June 30th, the day after his LL.D. was conferred at the
Harvard Commencement, a long session of the Executive
Committee of the Tuberculosis Association was held in
Boston ; and from there he went on to spend a fortnight at
Murray Bay, whence issued a shower of hand-written
notes on various subjects, some of which tell of trout-
fishing with ^ Isaac Walton who is very happy ; whereas
matters in which he had become involved are mentioned
in others :

To Miss Charlton. Caribou Cottage, Poiute-a-Pic.

[undated]

I was sorry that you left so soon, as there were many things I wished
to talk to you about. I hated to trouble you on the holiday but it
was my only day in town [Montreal] and I had to arrange about the
photographing of some of the old familiar specimens. I shall ask you
to send a few books. I wish you would look among your duplicate
Amer. Jr. of the Med. Sciences for the Jan. 1902 no. with a paper by
Dr. Delafield on Treatment of Pleurisy. I would like it very much.
We all missed you so much at the Librarians’ Meeting, Everyone
asked after you, &c.

To Ex-President Gtlman, 7th [July]

Thanks for your note received here to-day — Sc for the additions,
which pleased me greatly. I am publishing this summer a little
volume Aequanimitas &c.’] of collected addresses — for the boys * —
and I have dedicated it to you — without your knowledge and

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646

July 1904

consent ! You will not mind I know. With love to Mrs. Gilman,
Sincerely yours, &c. I sail for England next week*— short trip, as
Mrs Osier and the boy are here.

"To Professor Russell H, Chittenden, 9th [July]

I have undertaken to edit a System of Medicine for Lea Bros,
& I write to ask if you will not contribute a section of 75 pp. to
Vol I on Metabolism & Nutrition. General considerations —
Disturbances in disease — over & under nutrition &c. You have the
matter so well in hand that it should not be much trouble and
a presentation of the question from the modern standpoint would
be very helpful. Would you send me a line to the University Club,
New York, before Friday as I am sailing on Saturday. Lea Bros,
pay at the rate of $4. a page. With kind regards to Mrs. Chittenden.

Not long before this time there had been started at
Trudeau’s Sanitarium a semi-popular journal to encourage
the open-air treatment of tuberculosis. This had come to
Osier’s attention the month before, when he wrote the
first of these two characteristic notes to the anonymous
editor ; and now, though busy with other matters, he
found time to send them something for publication :

fTo Lawrason Brown:

I enclose five dollars for five subscriptions to the Outdoor Life,
the addresses to which they are to be sent being given below.

1. Dr. Wm Osier, i W, Franklin St., Baltimore.

2. Library of the Med. & Chir. Faculty, 747 N. Eutaw St.

3. Miss Adelaide Proctor, 47 Green St., Cumberland, Md.

4. Mrs. John J. Gibson, Room 1220, N.Y. Life Bldg., Chicago.

5. To someone who you think would enjoy it,

the Same : Pointe-a-Pic, P.Q. vii, ii. 04.

I enclose you a little memo of Fracastorius on the contagiousness
of Phthisis which may be of interest enough to put in your useful
paper. It was nice to see Trudeau looking so well. I leave for England
on Saturday the i6th by the Campania from New York, I hope
you will have a good summer — do not overwork. You must get
a good holiday in Europe. W*“ Osler.

To judge from the following letter, on his way through
Montreal he must have seen with C. F. Martin a patient
with an obscure malady, and he had evidently passed his
afternoon before sailing at the New York Academy of
Medicine in search of information regarding it :

Aet. 55

Habits Aboard Ship 647

To C. F. Martin : University Club, New York.

Friday [July 15].

I have been looking up the Hughlings Jackson triad to-day Sc have
not been able to find a very good account. Bruce in Gibson’s text-
book is the best. An Italian article has all the cases, but the reference

is at home. I would like very much to refer to Judge B ’s case

when I publish my paper. Would you ask Roddick if I could have
a photo of the tongue protruded &, if possible in the mouth too.
The lip points in different directions in the two positions, & could
you see if the left side of the palate is paralysed — ^it usually is. If the
Judge could stand a camera on the back of his neck also — to show the
atrophy of the upper Trapezius ’twould be pleasant. Let him mask
the upper face when the tongue is photographed. Send me a memo of
the cost of the photo. I wish you were coming with us. I have been
beguiled into editing a 7 (! ! !) volume System of Medicine, (McCrae
to do the dirty work) & shall need your help. What would you like
to write — think & say. Yours ever, W. O.

Early the following morning he sailed with his two young
friends — the three occupying the same cabin. The night
before, they had dined unwisely and too well at the Uni-
versity Club, and Osier for a few days was somewhat stricken
— below decks. On being offered the assistance of a pare-
goric tablet he inserted the minute object not in his mouth
but in a crevice under McCrae’s upper berth, where he
could contemplate it as though it were Digby’s Powder
of Sympathy. And so he was cured. His habits aboard ship
were interesting. His first act was to fill to overflowing the
rack in his berth with the books and papers he intended to
use. Always the first awake, he stayed in his bunk all
morning reading and writing for some four or five hours,
and there was plenty for him to do, as his paper for the
British Medical Association had to be put together. By
noon he would appear on deck, free from care, the liveliest
person aboard ; and soon the half-dozen doctors on the
passenger list, together with Francis Verdon, the ship’s
surgeon, were organized into the ^ North Atlantic Medical
Society ’ which met every afternoon at tea-time, and held
its final meeting on July 22nd, when a fictitious programme
of papers was presented, with amusing jibes on the various
members.

Any one who would keep on Osier’s trail during a first

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648

July 1904

day in London must needs have good staying qualities.
It is recalled that on this occasion, having been roused
at 4 a.m. in the Mersey for an early landing, and having
reached London by the boat train at noon, nothing would
do but that the remnants of the N. A. Medical Society
should go out to Haslemere and visit Jonathan Hutchinson.
This was done, a delightful afternoon and evening being
spent there, but when at midnight they got back to town
the eldest member of the ‘ society ’, Dr. James Tyson,
handed in his resignation. The pace was too much for him.
The next day, a day of shopping and sight-seeing, was
even more strenuous. It began with the White Star
Office ; to Brown, Shipley’s ; to the tailor’s in Savile Row,
where it took about ten minutes to order and be measured for
four suits of clothes ; to the Ulster House ditto for overcoats ;
to the College of Physicians ; to Sotheby’s auction rooms in
Wellington Street ; to Maggs Brothers, &c. — ^to account
for the morning alone. It was, of course, done in one of
the picturesque old hansom cabs long since vanished from
the London streets. That evening, on dining with H. D.
Rolleston, he casually remarked : ‘ Do you think I’m

sufficiently senile to become Regius Professor at Oxford ? ’ —
a remark which so misled Rolleston that when told later
that Osier would accept, he emphatically denied it.

During the Oxford meeting of the British Medical
Association, Osier, at least in the eyes of his two young
companions, occupied the centre of the stage, and it was
not long before they heard to their dismay some rumours
of the pressure that was being brought to bear upon him
to accept the Regius Professorship. On the evening of the
26th, in the Sheldonian Theatre, came Dr. Collier’s presi-
dential address on the ‘ Growth and Development of the
Oxford Medical School ’ — a timely subject. The customary
vote of thanks was moved by Clifford Allbutt, and Osier
in seconding it spoke most effectively in regard not only
to traditions and ideals, but to the necessity of combining
them with common sense. Though an impromptu speech,
his familiarity with Oxford traditions and Oxford medical
worthies was shown by his pointing out that John Locke
should have been included among the long list from

Aet. 55 The B. M. A. at Oxford 649

Roger Bacon to Henry Acland whom Dr. Collier had
mentioned.

On the following afternoon, before a brilliant assemblage
again in the Sheldonian, the Doctor of Science degree was
conferred in Convocation upon Allbutt, Sir William
Macewen, Jonathan Hutchinson, Sir Patrick Manson, and
one or two more, with Osier the last ; he receiving an
unexpected and prolonged ovation which brought an
unusual colour even to his dark skin. It was a busy and
exciting week, with the usual festivities : a soiree at the
Museum, a concert in the garden of St. John’s, a garden-
party at Blenheim and another at Warwick Castle, excursions
on the river and elsewhere, in addition to the scientific
sessions, at one of which he gave his paper, written on the
steamer, on the Treatment of Pleurisy ; and at the annual
dinner in Christ Church Hall he must reply to a toast —

‘ the Guests ’.

In spite of the fact that he had often said his ideal of life
would be to live within an hour of the British Museum
and to have The Times on his breakfast-table, he had
difficulty in coming to a decision, and so wrote to his wife.
She got his letter at Murray Bay one Sunday morning,
routed out Madame Rousseau at the telegraph-office and
cabled : ‘ do not procrastinate accept at once.’ This
message he showed to his anxious young friends, though
it was folded over, with only the ‘ do not procrastinate ’
portion visible, so that they were left uncertain until the
return home whether ‘ accept ’ or ‘ refuse ’ was the next
word.

Osier meanwhile had gone to North Berwick for a visit
with Schafer, leaving an impression on Oxford which is
indicated by the following letter, written by the President
of Magdalen to the Prime Minister the day after the
B. M. A. adjourned :

Magdalen College, Oxford, July 31, 1904.

. . . What I have to say is this. Dr. Osier has been here this last
week. I had some little talk with him. I found that the idea of his
coming had been mooted to him by Sir John Burdon Sanderson. He
gave me the impression that if he were offered the post he would
take it. And if he did come I believe he would really practically

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650

Aug. 1904

unite parties as no one else could. Over and above this I understand
Sir Victor Horsley would approve this appointment. But I have in
particular one very strong and interesting piece of evidence. Sir
William Broadbent who is of course a man of special eminence and
standing and has the advantage of being quite outside our schools and
their interests (and prejudices) was as it happened staying here as my
guest, last week. He told me he thought this appointment of
Dr. Osier would be a magnificent one for us and full of advantage for
the cause of medical education and science in this country and would
be recognized and welcomed as such by the medical world generally.

Further than this, I could not but be struck by the very good
reception and welcome which Dr. Osier received both when he spoke
on several occasions and when he came up for his honorary degree at
the Theatre. His speeches, too, impressed me very much. He is
a philosophic and cultivated man, a student and lover of Locke and
Burton and so far the kind of man whom Oxford generally, I believe,
would welcome. It would also, I think, be a very interesting and
pleasing thing from the Imperial point of view just now to appoint
a Professor to Oxford who is a Canadian by birth and a Professor in
the United States. I might say more, but will not trouble you with
a still longer letter. If you have not yet decided to prefer Dr. Osier
perhaps you will let these considerations have what weight in your
own exhaustive and deliberate estimate you think they are entitled
to. . . . With apologies for writing so much — I hope not more than
the situation deserves — I have the honour to be, Yours very
faithfully,

T. Herbert Warren (P. of M )

Balfour’s letter asking him to take the Chair reached
Osier on August 4th, the day before he sailed on the Cedric
for home, and he accepted with the request that the fact
be not made known for a fortnight. He said no word of
his decision to the survivor of his two companions, until
landing, though the fact that the writing-room steward,
long before the end of the voyage, ran out of U.S.A.
postage-stamps, indicated that something unusual was
being communicated to countless people by an olive-
complexioned man who sat in the corner and industriously
scribbled for several hours each day — notes like the following:

To W, S. Thayer : S.S. Cedric^ Aug. 6th.

You will be surprised when I tell you that I have accepted the
Chair of Medicine at Oxford ; — to leave next Spring ! ’Tis a serious
step, but I have considered it well from all points. I am on the down
grade, the pace of the last three winters has been such that I knew

Aet. 55 Announcing his Acceptance 651

I was riding for a fall Better to get out decently in time, & leave
while there is still a little elasticity in the rubber. It will be an awful
wrench to part with all you dear boys, but I shall only cut off 4 years
as I had firmly decided to chuck everything at 60. We can have
a last good winter’s work together, I hope, before I lapse into a quiet
academic life. Mrs Osier is strongly in favour of the move, which
is a mercy. The offer or suggestion came last spring from Sanderson,
the present occupant. I told him I would decide when I came over.
Balfour formally offered me the post — ’tis a crown appointment —
yesterday, & I accepted. Love to Sister Susan. Yours ever, W. O.

This was the general tenor of the notes. Most of the
recipients have kept them. His mother was told that ^ it
will be much better for Revere in every way & I will have
a quieter life. We can come out every year & I dare say
see more of you than we have done of late’. To Weir
Mitchell he wrote : ^ Just twenty years ago you &

Mrs. Mitchell were important factors in inducing me to
come to Philadelphia and you have been ever since a guide
& friend. To you then one of the first I must tell of another
change in my life.’ To his colleague Halsted, that he is
tired of the rushing life and that the peace and repose of the
old university appeals to him, for he has been heading down
hill and the pace has told. ^The worst will be parting
from my old colleagues he added. ' No man ever had
better, & I hate to think that I should be the first to break
the happy circle.’ And to Dock, the day before landing :

, . . Sanderson, who is an old friend and teacher, has been urging
it strongly, and I looked over the ground during the Association
week. I shall be able to work over a lot of my material— Typhoid,
Aneurysm, heait, &c which has been accumulating hopelessly.

I go through to Pointe a pic, Quebec, from New York. Shall you
go to St. Louis? Let me know, as we might go from Chicago
together. , . .

Even after he landed and joined his family at Murray Bay,
his shower of explanatory notes continued ; and soon letters
like the following began to pour in upon him when people
learned where he was :

From S. Weir Mitchell to W. 0 . Bar Harbour, Maine.

14th August, 1904.

I read your letter with very mingled feelings — pained because
your great example — so various in its values is to be lost to the

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652

Sept 1904

profession — pleased because of what Oxford will gain in an un-
trammelled, clear-headed American physician. Yes, American —
you will let me insist on that. I think you are wisely counselled to
go. Twice in the last year I was on the point of writing to ask you
to consider whether you were not being w'orked beyond your strength.
Selfishly speaking I am filled with the most honest regret. One by
one the older men who shared with me the fates of war and the
contests of peace, have died. I have picked up new friends — the
younger ones, men and women — and among the best, you — and is
it twenty years indeed ? When I read your letter to my wife, she
said isn’t it splendid? And I — isn’t it sorrowful? — for of course
this does take you out of my life, and at 74 the arithmetic of oppor-
tunity is easily summed up and made out. We shall see you I fear
but rarely, and very soon you will be saying raily for really and H’s
will be lost all over the house, and you will say Gawd foi God, as
is Oxford as she is spoke — Do be careful of your English. I am
chaffing you to keep from saying more of the personal loss to me.
As to Jn. Hopkins — perhaps you do not know that the Med. School
at J. H. is or was Wm. Osier. Are wt not to see you before you
go? My news is small. I have a novel done, and am made an
Honorary something of the French Academic.

His own notes were to the effect that his act was one of
preservation. For the daily grind of a consulting practice
into which he had become drawn was growing worse from
year to year, with less and less time for teaching and clinical
work. The new post he insisted was chiefly ornamental,
though he hoped to make it useful and would at least find
congenial work to do ; that he had had his day and it had
been a good one, but a younger man could do better — one
who does not ^ trade largely as we pre-seniles have to do on
our past reputation Such a letter he wrote, among others,
to Flexner on September ist, with this postscript :

PS. What do you know of ‘ healed splits ’ of the intima in con-
nection with dissecting aneurysm Sc rupture of the aorta and
healed dissecting aneurysm ? Have you had any cases of the latter ?
I am working at my aneurysm material.

To Dr, Maude Abbott from W. 0 . Pointe-a-Pic, P. Q. Sept. 5.

It is awfully good of you to send all those abstracts & the books.
It was exactly what I wanted. I will return the books in person
next week. I can then look over the other references which you
have given. The subject is one of really great interest. Remind
me, please, to go over the aneurysm cases in my post-mortem notes.
There are 29 or 30 of them. No, 180 I see is a perforation of pul-

Aet. 55

At Murray Bay 653

monary artery. I enclose you a list on a slip which please keep for
me. . . . PS. Your letter & the translation of Thoma just arrived.
Thank you so much.^ Do not mind about the others. I have been
going over the Eppinger paper carefully. Thoma supplements it
splendidly. I remember its appearance, but I had forgotten how
good it was. I shall be glad to look over your paper — ^ The Museum
in Medical Teaching ’ would be a good title. A good deal has been
written I think in English journals — ^look in Neale’s Medical Digest
under Museum & under teaching.

To Joseph H. Pratt from W. 0 . Pointe-a-Pic, Sept. 6th.

Thanks for your kind note & the slips. Very glad of the refer-
ence in the Gazette des Hopitaux. Somebody told me of a study
in progress on the strength of the Aorta, but I have forgotten who
it was. I wish you would look in the Harvard Museum if there
are any specimens of rupture of the Aorta, or of splits of the intima.
I am to edit for Lea Brothers a new system of medicine. I shall
get only the younger men to contribute. Give me a few hints from
Boston : (i) what would you like to write ? (2) send me a list of

the younger fellows & the special work they have been doing.
Cabot will take the blood section. I suppose there could be nobody
better than McCoUom for Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever. One of
Councilman’s men should do the pathology. . . .

Working at his aneurysm material and scarcely a fortnight
passed ! Nevertheless his wife writes to one of the ^ latch-
key ers ^ that he ^ is looking very well and really having
a holiday except for stacks of mail. We leave here on the
14th for Toronto, spending a day in Montreal, and I shall
stay there while he is in St. Louis.’ ^

To Edward Mtlburn from W, O. Pointe-a-Pic, 9th.

Dear Ned, I was on the point of writing to you when your
letter came. Mrs Hmneman has told me of your sorrow & trouble
about your son — how terribly sad for you all. And your account
is not very satisfactory. Though the early cases with haemorrhages
often start very badly & later the disease is arrested. I hope you are
keeping him in the ^ open ’ in these fine days. While he has fever
he should be flat on his back but the continuous out of door life
seems so good for the digestion & for the fever. Who is your doctor ?
Why not let him write me a description of the case ? I might be
able to be of help. I do not leave until next Spring. It will give

^ The International Congress of Arts and Sciences was held in connexion
with the St. Louis Universal Exposition, Sept. 19-25, under the presidency
of Simon Newcomb the astronomer.

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654

Sept. 1904

me a change I much need of a quieter life. Do let me hear how the
boy gets on. I shall be in Baltimore on the 24th.

His old schoolboy friend, one of the triumvirate of ^ Barrie’s
Bad Boys will be recognized ; and hardly a week passed
without some word of counsel or encouragement until the
end came two months later, when he wrote :

Dear Ned, How heart-breaking to part from your dear boy —
8c an only son ! I feared all along from the symptoms that it was
one of these acute types for which there is rarely any hope. Better
so perhaps than a slow lingering tw^o or three years of illness with
all its illusive hopes Sc anxious dreads. Do give my love Sc heartfelt
sympathy to your wife Sc the girls. They will be unconsolable, poor
things ! Affectionately yours, W. O.

And on the last day of his four weeks at Pointe-a~Pic he
wrote to W. S. Thayer :

Dear T. I have been so overwhelmed with correspondence that
I have neglected to answer your nice letter of the 28th. ... I am
so glad to hear that the Dispensary rooms are nearly ready. What
a comfort it will be to have plenty of room. I doubt very much
the wisdom of taking the men from the wards. So far as I know
it is never successful — they always regard the work as extra Sc neglect
one or the other. There should be enough good young fellows,
who have time enough in their waiting years. The difficulty with
such men as Brown Sc Hamburger is a serious one — they are so good
& so busy. I am sure the St. Louis address will be A.i. Send me
word to Fischel, where you are. F’s address is — see the Trans Ass,
I have forgotten it. Thanks for the papers. The typhoid heart
Sc arteries sequelae has I see been widely noticed. I have been
deep in Aneurysm literature, Sc have gone thro. Thoma’s five papers
Sc Eppinger’s colossal arbeit. I have spent a couple of mornings
with Dr Maude Abbott at the McGill Museum going over my old
specimens. , . .

They left the comparative seclusion of Murray Bay on
the 14th and returned to the noisy world in whose press
since the middle of August his name had been much head-
lined. A week later from Dundas Mrs. Osier wrote of their
eagerness to get back to Baltimore, and added : ^ I am
already weary of the triumphal procession through Canada
of the Regius Professor and his family ; do pray ask all his
friends to make it easy for him : he will find it hard to say
adieu.’ There is no gainsaying that his decision was con-

Aet 55

Back to a Noisy World 655

sidered as a great blow to the Johns Hopkins. How his
colleagues felt is evident from their letters to him. ‘ If
talents, self-sacrifice and high devotion to the good of the
profession deserve any reward you certainly have earned
the promotion wrote one of them. ‘ But what are we
to do here in the hospital and medical school and in the
community at large, where you have done so much and are
likely to leave so much still to do that nobody can do so
well ? The success of the hospital and medical school has
been largely your achievement and you have done the most
to bind together the different departments and to establish
a high standard of professional work.’

Outpourings of this sort from his professional colleagues
were natural enough and to be expected ; but no one could
have foreseen what effect his decision would have upon the
community at large, among whom as an unnaturalized
citizen he had resided for a short fifteen years. There was
an actual wail of regret mingled with the congratulations
from press, pulpit, and public on all sides. Whether he
would have been able to make up his mind in favour of
Oxford had he attempted to do so while in Baltimore may
be doubted. He was now in for such a back-breaking
autumn, winter, and spring as made the preceding ones
lazy in comparison. For to his customary activities was
added not only the painful duty of severing his American
contacts — and such a man is not let go easily by his admirers
— but also the need of picking up some threads of the
complicated life ahead of him in Oxford. There were many
duties in connexion with the new post — the ‘ R. P. M.’ —
in which he had to receive instruction. The Vice-Chancellor
had written during the autumn that among other things he
was ex officio Senior Examiner for Degrees in Medicine, so
a substitute must be provided ; and further :

I may add a few words as to the formalities of becoming a member
of the University. With our curious double system it is necessary,
or at least desirable, to be a member of one of the Colleges. May
I say, in case you have not yet fixed upon a College, that it would
be a special pleasure to me and, I venture to say, to all the Fellows
of Oriel, if I might put your name on the books of the College?
The next step is matriculation, or becoming a member of the Uni-
versity. This follows immediately upon being admitted to a college.

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656

Sept.-Oct 1904

Then Convocation passes a decree conferring the Degree of Doctor
of Medicine. You are then a member of Convocation with the vote
and all rights and privileges. . , .

There had been other proposals, and he was strongly
drawn towards Magdalen, which was Sanderson’s college and
to which ^ that delightful man Walter Raleigh has just been
elected With all this, he found time to help other people
with their personal projects :

To Dr, Maude Abbott from W, 0 . Sept. 1904.

The report is most encouraging. The stenographer will be a great
help. I wonder how you got through so much writing. I think
it would be quite feasible to get the necessary money for the printing
by private subscription. Let me try what I can do. I will write
to the members of the Faculty- — and some others. It would be one
of the very best advertisements of the School. I will try to look
up R. J. B. Howard’s notes to-day. I have been simply swamped
with work since my return. I wish I could get free for a year. I return
the notes as they may be needed. . . .

On October 5th exercises were held to commemorate the
opening of the much-needed new clinical amphitheatre in
which Osier was to carry on his teaching for only a few
months longer. There were many guests, and addresses
were made by Louis A. Stimson of New York, by Clifford
Allbutt, Osier’s ^ brother Regius ’ from Cambridge, who
happened to be in the country, by Abraham Jacobi, by
ex-President Gilman, by Welch, and others. In the after-
noon the audience reassembled to unveil the tablet in
memory of Jesse Lazear of the Yellow Fever Commission.
Osier presided, and before introducing the chief speaker,
James Carroll, who with Lazear had shared in Walter Reed’s
epochal experiments, he spoke feelingly as follows :

It has been well said that Milton’s poem ^ Lycidas ’ touches the
high-water mark of all poetry. This is true not only because the poem
appeals to us by its intrinsic merit and worth, but because it touches
that chord in each one of us which responds to the personal loss of
some young man to whom we had become attached. Those of us
who have got on in years mourn many young fellows whom we
have seen stricken by our sides. We have had in this hospital for-
tunately only a few such losses. We have lost on the medical side
Meredith Reese, Oppynheim and Ochsner ; and we have also lost
a man of rare worth, in whose memory we meet to-day, whose story

Aet. 55

The News Reporter 657

will be told you by Dr. Carroll and Dr. Thayer : Jesse William
Lazear, a Baltimore boy, a Hopkins graduate of the Academic
Department, a graduate of Columbia University in Medicine and
a resident physician of this hospital, the first man to take charge of
our clinical laboratory, who, in Cuba, sacrificed his life in the cause
of humanity. . . .

Beset as he was at all times, and particularly at this period,
by representatives of the press, few of them ever got by the
faithful Morris at the door, and when they did by feigning
an appointment, the interview was brief. A reporter had
broken in upon him one day to get his comment upon
a cable dispatch published that morning in the New York
Herald regarding a new cure for pneumonia (an electrical
solution of gold and silver) discovered by a Professor Robin
of Paris. Osier is reported to have read the clipping, to
have folded it carefully and to have remarked on returning
it : ‘ You can say that New York Herald medicine, especially
the Paris variety, is discredited by the medical profession.’
But there were times when, cornered by a reporter, his
M’Connachie got the better of him, as it did in connexion
with Jacobi’s visit to attend the ceremonies of the 5th.
Jacobi, a small man of frail physique despite his leonine head
and shock of hair, was a guest at i West Franklin Street and
the house was besieged by reporters, one of whom Osier
finally saw. The press that evening contained a long
account of Professor Jacobi’s athletic prowess, for though
he was incidentally a children’s specialist he was chiefly
known as a pole- vault er and high jumper, in which events
he held the record of the New York Athletic Association,
&c. For this and similar pranks Osier was to be severely
penalized in a few months’ time.

Early in October his Ingersoll Lecture^ was ready for
distribution, and the first of the many reprintings and
editions of the ‘ Aequanimitas ’ volume, dedicated to
D. C. Gilman, had been issued both in England and
America. Both of these publications were widely reviewed,
and though the twelve collected addresses rescued from the
oblivion of professional journals had been written for
‘ medical students, nurses, and practitioners of medicine ’,

^ Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co,

V u

2923.1

The Oxford Call

658

Oct.— Nov. 1904

they proved to contain ^ a deep mine of golden counsel ’
equally suited for others. A series of lay sermons they are,
and, as one reviewer ^ said : ^ It would be well for society
in general if all the sermons preached from the pulpits in
Christendom showed the lofty feeling for all that is good
and true, the genial wisdom and the energizing quality of
these discourses.’ They showed not only lofty feelings but
a sense of humour and a love of good literature ; appended
to the volume was a list of ten items constituting a ^ bedside
library for medical students who were advised not to rest
satisfied with their professional training but to get the
education, if not of a scholar, at least of a gentleman. The
list began, of course, with the Scriptures and Shakespeare,
and ended with the ^ Breakfast Table ’ series.

To Mrs. Gurney Curtis from W. 0 . Oct. 10, 1904.

Your name has been on the list to send that wretched [Ingersoll]
Lecture to for weeks, but I have not had your address, and Miss
Humpton has not been able to get it. This morning youi letter
comes, and I at once send you off the lecture with the greatest
pleasure. I know you are a Teresian — in disguise. Dr. McCrae
has left the hospital, but Dr. Howard is still faithful and good.
I hope you have had a good summer. Please come into the
hospital for a few weeks at least before I leave. Make it this
time a biceps tendon so that you will be able to walk about.

Sincerely yours, &c.

With all his multiplying obligations he did not relinquish
his old ones nor fail in his customary regular attendance at
meetings. This was ingrained, and particularly when there
was up-hill work to be done he was to be counted on. The
Executive Committee of the National Association for the
Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, to give a single
example, held frequent meetings — in New York on Octo-
ber 1 8th and again on November i6th, in Philadelphia on
December ist, in New York again January 9th, and so on ;

^ Another wrote ; ‘ We have made a rough calculation that there ai c
650 examples of the quotatio recta in the less than 400 small octavo pages of
good-sized type ; while as for the examples of the quotatio ohhqua — the
tags ” and reminiscences of browsings among well-loved books, the words
and phrases that in a flash bring to mind the inspirations of great men, and
what our fathers in literature have declared unto us — ^their name is legion :
they are not to be counted.’

Aet. 55 John Locke’s Bicentenary 659

and as Trudeau’s health, rarely permitted him to be present
Osier was usually in the chair.

The two-hundredth anniversary of John Locke’s death
was observed by a large gathering at McCoy Hall on
October 28^, and he entered enthusiastically into the
preparations for the occasion — indeed did most of the
preliminary^ work — made one of the several afternoon
addresses, his topic being ^ Locke as Physician ’ — and in the
evening gave a large dinner at the Maryland Club for which
he had prepared a special John Locke menu with many
appropriate quotations from the philosopher’s writings. So
he delighted to take trouble ; and one may be sure that at
the corner of West Franklin Street no opportunity was lost
to celebrate other anniversaries, one of them on the 5th of
November, when Revere had his chance at gunpowder,
treason, and plot ’, and more than the usual explosions
occurred in the cellar, accompanied by hair-raising groans
disseminated through the house by way of the furnace pipes.

To the Pres, of Magdalen from W. O. Nov. 10.

Dear Mr. Warren, — I am glad you liked the lecture — not an easy
subject to handle, I will ask Constable & Co. to send a copy to
Lord Tennyson. ^ In Memoriam ’ has always been to me a great
sermon on Immortality. You will get in a week or two a volume
of addresses, some of which may interest you. I have accepted
a Professorial Studentship at Christ Church. I had left the matter
in Sir John’s hands, as I had had invitations from Oriel and Lincoln
and New. I hope I have not made z faux pas in accepting at Christ
Church, but I had no time for consultation with anyone as I only
had the letter on the 8 th and the election is on the i 6 th, so I had
to cable. . . .

To George Dock from W, O. Nov. 10.

What fools these publishers make of us ! I do not see the slightest
objection to your transposing verbs and adjectives and a few pre-
positions and making the one stone kill two birds. Is there anything
that you would like better than the group of diseases associated with
internal secretion? I think we shall cut the thymus out of that
section and put it with the lymphatics, as it is uncertain whether
it has any internal secretion. It would be a pretty full section with
the suprarenals and the thyroid, including Graves’ disease. Would
you prefer to take disease of the lungs? That would come in
Volume III, and we should want it earlier. Let me know, please,
at once. Thanks for the note. I am trying to make a new book of

Aet. 55

In a Weak Moment

66i

the next ten days. Do let me have any suggestions. . . . Do find
out who the good young fellows are, working at tuberculosis in
Chicago. We must catch the workers to make the affair go. , . .

To Dr. Lewellys F. Barker. xi. 27. 04.

In a weak moment I consented to edit for Lea Bros a new System
of Medicine. McCrae will do all the rough work as assistant editor.

I would like you to chip in with your pen — a good introductory
section to the Nervous System — ^like one of Cohnheim’s chapters
— ^would suit you — k me. Anything else? Throw an eye on the
question of classification of the Diseases of the N. S. for such a system.
What modifications would you suggest in that given in my text-
book. I am sweating away at a new edition — am almost rewriting
the Infectious diseases and knocking many of the other sections to
splinters — I am tired of the sequence of paragraphs ! I hope all
goes well with Mrs. B. & the twins.

A short two years before this time there had been buried
in the solid granite of the Matoppos a remarkable English-
man whose work by no means ended at his death. To
judge from the following letter the Rhodes bequest had
been drawn upon to help endow the Chair of Pathology
so as to hold Ritchie in Oxford. For, though some of the
colleges might be rich, the university itself had scant funds,
as Osier was to learn :

T 0 Professor Arthur Thomson from W. 0 . 28th [Nov.]

Thanks for yours of the i6th. I am delighted to hear that the
Rhodes fund has contributed £200 a year. I have been in corre-
spondence with Parkin the Secretary, who sent me Rhodes’ will
with its interesting Medico- Chirurgical aspiration — not likely to be
realized in our day. So sorry to have you bothered with my letters.
I hope to be able to fix a date for my departure before very long.
My two associates would do the work at the school very well. I am
really tied by a heavy literary venture for which I had signed the
contract in June — a new System of Medicine — and the publishers
would not let me free. I must arrange the details before leaving
tho it is very slow work, assigning the articles, and making all the
plans for a seven volume work. Fortunately McCrae will see to the
proof reading &c on this side. I hope to be able to get away in May
at the latest. I think it would be best if we took a furnished house
for a few months. Mrs. Osier has been put by friends in com-
munication with ^ Brooks ’. Let me know should you hear of any-
thing. I would like to be in the outskirts, though I suppose for
consultation work I should not be too far away. I was delighted
to hear of my election to Christ Church.

662

The Oxford Call

Nov.-Dee. 1904

Osier’s feeling about clubs in general has been mentioned.
He was not gastronomically inclined, despite the tuneless
chant which a stodgy pudding usually evoked. But clubs
sought him — even dinner clubs, and there were many more
to follow. The next letter is from his old friend of London
days in the ’70’s :

Sir George Savage to W. 0 . 3 Henrietta St., Cavendish Sq.,

Nov. 30, 1904.

Dear Osier, — I now write in a semi-official position. I happen to
be Secretary to what is called ‘ The College Club ’. I enclose a list
of members, it is very old and very exclusive. Its chief objects
being meetings for dinner, which meetings are held on the last
Mondays of about seven months in the year. Of course the few
Fellows residing out of London cannot be expected to dine regularly
but would always be welcome. I write thus privately, as you are
to come to reside with us, to ask if you would be inclined to become
a member if you were unanimously elected ? I shall be glad to hear
from you on this point early, though our next meeting will not be
till the end of January.

About this time, too, a club of Washington and Baltimore
book-lovers was started, the Stultifera Navis Club, which
until Osier left in the spring, met with enthusiasm once
a month and then died. It seemed lifeless in his absence.
Alfred Parsons, Herbert Putnam, and Worthington Ford
of the Congressional Library ; William H. Buckler, J. H.
Hollander, W. S. Thayer, Robert Garrett and a few others
from Baltimore, were members. And there was another,
the Charaka Club, composed largely of New York doctors
who were bibliophiles, and though he did not often attend,
perhaps for that very reason pressure was brought to bear
on him to come to a meeting arranged in his honour. It
was then that he read his paper on Fracastorius, about whom
he had been in correspondence with Weir Mitchell earlier
in the year, some products of his reading having already
gone to Lawrason Brown for his Saranac jouinal. The
essay thus begins :

Upon few pictures in literature do we dwell with greater pleasure
than that of Catullus returning to his home near Verona, wearied
with the pleasures of the Capital, sick at heart after the death of his
much beloved brother, and still, we may fancy, aching with the
pangs of misprized love ; but at the sight of ‘ Paeninsularum Sirmio,

Aet 55 On Fracastorius 663

insularumque ocella he breaks out into joyful song and all his cares
vanish.

Fifteen centuries later another ‘ Bard of Sirmio ’ sang the joys of
the Lago di Garda, ^ mid Caphian hills and while we cannot claim
for Fracas tor a place beside his immortal townsman, he occupies
a distinguished position in our annals as the author of the most
successful medical poem ever written, and as the man from whom
we date our first accurate knowledge of the processes of infection
and contagion. . . .

To Mr, Henry Phipps from W, O, Dec. 23rd, 1904.

Many thanks for your kind remembrance, which I appreciate very
much. I have asked Blakiston & Co. Phila. to send you a volume of
addresses which I have just published. They are a bit medicated
as Oliver Wendell Holmes would say, but you have mingled enough
with doctors to understand them. I am just off to Boston for Xmas.
We hope to open the Tuberculosis dispensary in January. Could
you come down? What date would be most convenient for you.
With kind remembrances to Mrs Phipps & your family,

Christmas was passed with Mrs. Osier’s sister in Jamaica
Plain, and the last few days of the year with his own people
in Canada. There he was heavily subjected. In Toronto
he opened on the 29th the new Library of the Ontario
Academy of Medicine, towards the erection of which he
had himself contributed a generous sum and many volumes.
The next day he was tendered a public luncheon by the
Canadian Club, his sensible and amusing remarks on this
occasion, entitled ^ The Anglo-American Relations of
Canada being widely quoted in the Canadian papers. And
the year ends with a note enclosing his usual Christmas gift
to his old friend of Barrie days :

xii. 31. 04.

Deal Ned, You must have had a very sad Xmas — with your poor
boy away. I wish I could have seen you while I was in Toronto
this week, but I was up to my ears in engagements. We do not leave
until May. I shall be in Toronto in April. I wish we could meet
then. With love to all at home & best wishes for the new year,
Ever youis, W*^' Osler.

CHAPTER XXIV

1905

THREE VALEDICTORY ADDRESSES

During the few months that remained Osier had his
hands full. Besides, he was very much in the public eye, in
demand on all sides, the centre of interest wherever he might
appear. This was not only embarrassing for a man accus-
tomed to go about unknown and unmolested, but placed
him in a situation, in those fallen times of journalism, when
a slip or an imagined slip on his part was likely to be pounced
upon by a feline press. There was written some years later
an article entitled ‘ The Confessions of a Yellow-journalist ’,
in which the forgotten author cited Admiral George Dewey
and Dr. William Osier as the two best-known examples of
persons who in his time had been victimized for the purpose
of ‘ copy ’ — popular idols one day, held up to scorn and
ridicule the next, and for so long as discussion would keep the
topic alive. N ot all the press participated. There were some
notable exceptions, and even Life made ample amends for
some things it had once said. According to its editor it was
‘ a dull time, when no other lively news was obtainable. The
President had said or done nothing surprising for a week or
two, Congress was in the doldrums, newspaper readers were
yawning a little, and along came Dr. Osier and filled a gap.’
A man with less philosophy in his make-up, less charitable-
ness towards his fellows, and with a less well-bridled tongue
than his might not have lived it down.

The Johns Hopkins University celebrates its own birthday
with that of the ‘ Father of his Country ’ on February 22nd,
and it was inevitable that this year the ceremonies in con-
nexion with the event should resolve themselves into an
outburst of tributes to the greatly beloved man who was
soon to leave. For the occasion Osier had prepared with
even more than his usual pains a farewell address which in an
ill-starred moment, having Anthony Trollope’s little-read
novel of the same name in mind, he entitled ‘ The Fixed

Act. 55

A Little-read Novel

665

Period Indeed, his interruptions had been so many and
so unavoidable that, on or about the 20th, he had fled in
despair to New York, where, in the seclusion of the library
of the University Club, the address was put in its flnal form.
On his return he did what for him was an unusual thing :
before the assembled ‘ latch-keyers ’ at tea the next after-
noon he read the address aloud, and no one of his hearers
even suspected the brink he was standing upon. Only
a single criticism was made, and that by his wife, who
remarked : ‘ I’m not sure, Willie, that I exactly like what
you said about “ the old ladies in cap and fichu ” ’ — a sen-
tence he promptly amended.

The 2 1st was a very busy day given over to the formal
opening of the Phipps Dispensary. It was the culmination
of his efforts in the local fight against tuberculosis, which
had begun six years before when, conscious of the unsatis-
factory treatment of pulmonary consumption as practised
in the out-patient clinic, he had finally appointed one of the
students as a domiciliary visitor who was to follow these
patients to their homes and to report upon their living
conditions. There was no place in the world where social
and academic functions were more happily combined than
in hospitable Baltimore in those days. Many guests had
been invited : Mr. Henry Phipps himself was present ;
Hermann Biggs of New York gave the principal address ;
there were others, by Osier, by Welch, and by H. B. Jacobs ;
and one of those famous Maryland Club dinners followed.
It was aU very simple, very dignified ; and Mr. Phipps
glowed with pleasure at the cordiality of his reception, for
he was made the central figure.

The next day, the 22nd, was throughout an Osier day.
Such an unrestrained outpouring of appreciation for what
he had done, of regret at his departure ; such a demonstra-
tion of love and affection on the part of students, alumni,
faculty, and community few teachers have ever received.
Most men would have to live after death to know how others
really regard them, but it fell to Osier’s lot several times
in his life to have paid to him in public the embarrassing
tributes usually reserved for obituary notices. The univer-
sity had never seen such a gathering of alumni. McCoy Hall

666 The Fixed Period Feb. 1905

was packed to the window-sills. Osier was the centre of the
stage, at fifty-five with not a grey hair in his head, sur-
rounded by his devoted friends of the past and present
faculty, several of them, like Basil Gildersleeve, already be-
yond the allotted threescore years and ten. Suppressing his
emotion, but with unwonted colour in his cheeks, he read
his valedictory :

. . . Who can understand [he said] another man’s motives ? Does
he always understand his own ? This much I may say in explanation —
not in palliation. After years of hard work, at the very time when
a man’s energies begin to flag, and when he feels the need of more
leisure, the conditions and surroundings that have made him what
he is and that have moulded his character and abilities into something
useful in the community — these very circumstances ensure an ever-
increasing demand upon them ; and when the call of the East comes,
which in one form or another is heard by all of us, and which grows
louder as we grow older, the call may come like the summons to
Elijah, and not alone the ploughing of the day, but the work of
a life, friends, relatives, even father and mother, are left, to take
up new work in a new field. Or, happier far, if the call comes, as it
did to Puran Das in Kipling’s story, not to new labours, but to
a life private, unactive, calm, contemplative

And he went on to discuss the several problems of university
life suggested by his departure — the dangers of staying too
long in one place ; the beneficial effects upon faculties of
changes in personnel ; the advantages of a peripatetic life
particularly for young men ; the fixed period for the
teacher, either of time of service or of age, rather than an
appointment ad vitam aut culfam :

I have two fixed ideas [he said] well known to my fiiends, harmless
obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have
a direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the com-
parative uselessness of men above forty yeais of age. This may
seem shocking, and yet read aright the world’s history bears out the
statement. Take the sum of human achievement m action, in
science, in art, in literature — subtract the work of the men above
forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless
treasures, we would practically be where we are to-day. It is difficult
to name a great and far-reaching conquest of the mind which has
not been given to the world by a man on whose back the sun was
still shining. The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world
is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty — these fifteen

Aet. 55

Contemplation and Chloroform 667

golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which
there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good.
In the science and art of medicine, young or comparatively young
men have made every advance of the first rank. Vesalius, Harvey,
Hunter, Bichat, Laennec, Virchow, Lister, Koch — the green years
were yet upon their heads when their epoch-making studies were
made. To modify an old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty,
rich mentally at forty, vvise spiritually at fifty— or never. . . .

My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of
age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political,
and in professional life if, as a matter of course, men stopped work
at this age. In his ^ Biathanatos ’ Donne tells us that by the laws of
certain wise states sexagenarii were precipitated from a bridge, and
in Rome men of that age were not admitted to the suffrage and
they were called Defontani because the way to the senate was fet
fonteniy and they from age were not permitted to come thither.
In that charming novel, 'The Fixed Period', Anthony Trollope
discusses the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this
ancient usage, and the plot hinges upon the admirable scheme of
a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation
before a peaceful departure by chloroform. That incalculable
benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent to anyone who, like
myself, is nearing the limit, and who has made a careful study of the
calamities which may befall men during the seventh and eighth
decades. Still more when he contemplates the many evils which
they perpetuate unconsciously, and with impunity. As it can be
maintained that all the great advances have come from men under
forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion
of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians — nearly all the great
mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the
bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels, not a few of the bad
sermons and speeches. It is not to be denied that occasionally there
is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of reach
of the body’s decay. Such a one has learned the secret of Hermippus,
that ancient Roman who feeling that the silver cord was loosening,
cut himself clear from all companions of his own age and betook
himself to the company of young men, mingling with their games
and studies, and so lived to the age of 153, fuerorum hahtu refocillatus
et educatus. And there is truth in the story, since it is only those
who live with the young who maintain a fresh outlook on the new
problems of the world. The teacher’s life should have three periods,
study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until
sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
Whether Anthony Trollope’s suggestion of a college and chloroform
should be carried out or not I have become a little dubious, as my
own time is getting so short.

668 The Fixed Period Feb. 1905

From this he went on to the second part of the address,
which dealt with what the Johns Hopkins foundation had
already done and might still do for Medicine ; and he told
wherein lay his chief pride — in the reintroduction of the
old-fashioned method of practical instruction. desire’,
he said, no other epitaph than the statement that I taught
medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the
most useful and important work I have been called upon
to do.’ At the close, Dr. Welch, in a few moving words
presented him, ^ the chief ornament of our Medical Faculty’,
to President Remsen as the single candidate of the year for
an honorary degree, and the university LL.D. was conferred.
It was a memorable occasion.

That evening the lighter side of Baltimore broke loose,
and at the alumni gathering, which had swelled to unparal-
leled proportions, there were lively speeches made and poems
read and jests passed, many of them at his expense, as was
possible in those days in view of the intimacy between
Hopkins teachers and students. Under it all there lay,
however, the deep feeling well expressed in an editorial in
that evening’s paper, which said in part :

In making his last appearance at a public function of the Johns
Hopkins University as a member of its faculty, Dr. Osier accom-
plished the remarkable feat of making an address which, both in its
entertaining and semi-humorous part and in its retrospective and
fully serious part, so fastened his hearers’ interest as to divert their
attention from the thought which would otherwise have been
predominant in their minds — the thought of the loss the university
and this community are about to sustain in his departure. No
ingenuity of argument can diminish the feeling of what is the keenest
part of that loss ; for while much may be said for the good that can
come to a university from a change of professors, from the infusion
of new blood, it remains an unescapable fact that there are some
personalities that play a part which is unique, and for which no
equivalent can be found by any formula. It is not simply by the
estimate of his tangible and measurable services that the value of
the presence of such a man as Osier is to be judged ; and when the
delight of listening to his address was over, the first thought that
came to many a mind was that the man who made the address is
a man whose loss it is impossible for this community to think of
without the most acute regret.

The storm did not break until the next day, when it was

Aet. 55

The Storm Breaks

669

headlined throughout the country that OSLER RECOM-
MENDS CHLOROFORM AT SIXTY ; and for days and
weeks there followed pages of discussion, with cartoons
and comments, caustic, abusive, and worse, with only an
occasional word in his behalf lost in the uproar. Day by
day there were columns of letters contributed by newspaper
readers, none of whom in all probability had read the
innocent paragraphs said half in jest which have been quoted
above ; until to ‘ Oslerize ’ became a byword for mirth and
opprobrium. Knowing nothing of the whimsical reference
to Trollope’s novel, interposed to mask his own pain at
parting, nor of the rather pathetic allusion to his own
advancing years, the public at large felt that it was the
heartless view of a cold scientist who would condemn man
as a productive machine. Few of these things could he have
seen, for news clippings were sedulously kept from him, even
the abusive and threatening letters which by the wagon-
load poured into i West Franklin Street from all over
the country never reached him, but were consigned to the
basket by a devoted secretary.

He gave the famous address [writes ex-President Remsen] at my
request, though I had no idea what he was going to say. I presided
on the occasion of its delivery, and it never occurred to me that
he was getting into hot water. It went to boiling in a few days,
and in spots it was super-heated. I happened to meet him with
Mrs. Osier one morning when the temperature was high, and she
said : ‘ I am escorting the shattered idol home from church.’

It required no great degree of intelligence to distinguish
between the serious and the jocular in what Osier had said,
and if rightly read certainly no one’s feelings, even were he
past life’s meridian, should have been ruffled in the slightest.
It was regrettable that so admirable an address, the sig-
nificance of which could hardly be over-estimated as an
authoritative expression of opinion on matters relating to
medical teaching, should, because of paucity of other news
or some motive equally trivial, have been brought to the
public eye in such ridiculous guise. Efforts were made in
vain to get him to refute his statement ; and though there
can be no question but that he was sorely hurt, he went on
his way with a smile, and with his characteristic gesture

The Fixed Period

670

Feb. 1905

waved oif in after-years the many playful allusions to chloro-
forming which were subsequently made in his presence.
He broke his silence on only one or two occasions : one of
them was two years later when in Oxford he penned the
preface of the second edition of his ‘ Aequanimitas ’ :

To this edition [he wrote] I have added the three valedictory-
addresses delivered before leaving America. One of these — ‘ The
Fixed Period’ — demands a word of explanation. ‘To interpose
a little ease to relieve a situation of singular sadness in parting
from my dear colleagues of the Johns Hopkins University, I jokingly
suggested for the relief of a senile professoriate an extension of
Anthony Trollope’s plan mentioned in his novel ‘ The Fixed Period ’.
To one who had all his life been devoted to old men, it was not
a little distressing to be placarded in a world--wide way as their
sworn enemy, and to every man over sixty whose spirit I may have
thus unwittingly bruised, I tender my heartfelt regrets. Let me
add, however, that the discussion which followed my remarks has
not changed, but has rather strengthened my belief that the real
work of life is done before the fortieth year and that after the
sixtieth year it would be best for the world and best for ourselves if
men rested from their labours.

Though he loved young people more, and felt that the
future lay in their hands, his love for the aged was scarcely
less. Few men during their lives had gone out of their way
farther and more often to pay them tribute. By inheritance
he should grow happily old himself ; his mother was soon
to see her ninety-ninth spring, and one need not go far to
find record of his real feeling. Not many months after this
trying time, at a complimentary dinner given in Providence,
Rhode Island, in honour of Dr. J. W. C. Ely on his eighty-
fifth birthday, there was read an unsolicited tribute which
Osier had written for the occasion ^ on the art of growing
old gracefully. It ended in this way : ‘ You remember one
evening at dinner that I taxed you with having written
sonnets. It was my dulness that made me suggest it.
I should have known better. You have written man’s
best poem which your friends know by heart and which
will remain as a precious memory long after you have
crossed the bar.’ For such generous acts as this, many
old people knew and loved Osier, and heeded not the views

^ Providence Medical Journal^ April lo, 1906.

Aet. 55

Gildersleeve’s Sonnet

671

popularly ascribed to him. One of them, indeed, who sat
on the platform on the 22nd of February, whose life has
also been a poem, and who, too, has made sonnets in days
since his eyes began to fail, composed this, fourteen years
later, for what proved to be Osier’s last birthday :

William the Fowler, Guillaume I’Oiseleur !

I love to call him thus and when I scan
The counterfeit presentment of the man,

I feel his net, I hear his arrows whir.

Make at the homely surname no demur,

* Nor on a nomination lay a ban

With which a line of sovran lords began, —

Henry the Fowler was first Emperor.

Asclepius was Apollo’s chosen son.

But to that son he never lent his bow.

Nor did Hephaestus teach to forge his net ;

Both secrets hath Imperial Osier won.

His winged words straight to their quarry go.

All hearts are holden by his meshes yet.

And this same greatly honoured gentleman, Dean of the
classical world, now in his ninety-third year,^ has this to say
of the ^ Fixed Period ’ episode :

My relations with Osier were friendly but not close. From the
beginning of our acquaintance I fell under the spell of his personality,
and though not one of those who stood nearest to him, I yield to
few in my affection for the man, and my admiration for his rare
gifts. ... As in the case of such wonderful men, such complex natures
ever claimed a clearer understanding than is possible by the average
acquaintance, and so I fancied that I understood him better than
some of those who worshipped him. His famous speech which made
some of the auditors grieve for me, did not cause me a flutter. In
1905 I sat opposite to him at the Christ Church gaudy, and in
reply to a light lemark about his McCoy Hall performance, he said :
‘ The way of the jester is hard.’ I know that he always maintained
that he was in earnest, when he propounded his Thesis, but the
whole matter is an old story to one who knows that the antique
floruit was forty. One of my favourite poets commends turning the
fair side outward — but in Osier’s case it is hard to say which is the
fairer, the jest or earnest.

^ Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins University
1876-1915, D.Litt. both of Oxford and Cambridge in 1905, died not many
months after these paragraphs were written.

The Fixed Period

672

Mar. 1905

That Osier was able to touch upon the episode with an
apparently light heart is shown in his contemporary letters,
of which these are samples :

Wednesday.

Dear Mr. Phipps, Thanks for your kind note. I am glad to see
that you have got back safely. I hope Mrs. Phipps is much imp^roved
by the trip. The Times Editorial ^ is very much to the point. What
a tempest my innocent & jocose remarks raised ! Such a torrent of
abuse & misunderstanding began to flow in that I took my old
Master, Plato’s advice & crept under the shelter of a wall until the
storm blew over — ^working hard and reading nothing about i^.
I shall be in New York next week on my way to Montreal Sc shall
call if you are to be in town. . . .

March 2.

Dear Pratt, Thanks for your letter Sc for the references. They
are most interesting. We shall expect you to stay here on Monday.
I hope you are hurrying, as the years are flying and you will soon be
forty. Sincerely yours.

On the Monday referred to, the i6th, there was a sympo-
sium at the Johns Hopkins Medical Society on the subject
of blood platelets, at which Osier gave a rhume of the
history of the subject, and there were papers by George T.
Kemp, of Champagne, Illinois, and J. H. Pratt, of Boston,
who was soon to be forty h Kemp, who had been study-
ing blood platelets on the top of Pike’s Peak, found them to
contain haemoglobin, and in the discussion Osier remarked
that he had seen a good many blood platelets but none that
blushed.

To Professor Arthur Thomson from W, 0 . March 3rd.

Many thanks for your kindness in the matter of the house, I think
we have settled upon the Max Muller one for June Sc July which
will give us time to look about. I am sorry to hear that Sanderson
has not been so well. I hope my re-hashed Anthony Trollope joke
of chloroform at 60 years has not been taken seriously by the English
papers. The Yellow Journals here have raised a deuce of a row over
it Sc over my jests about men of 40 & men of 60. I have had a very
hard time of it, but the tempest is subsiding. With many thanks
for your trouble, Sincerely yours, [&c.] PS, I am glad to hear that
the money is coming in for the pathology professorship. Have

^ To this effect : ‘ It is no small feat to have deluded into seriousness
a nation of humorists

Aet. 55 The Charaka Club 673

Mount ^Stephen and Stiathcona been asked? I might be able to do
something with them.

On March 4th in New York a dinner of the Charaka Club
was held in his honour, each guest being presented with
a bronze plaque of him struck from the Vernon medallion
and bearing on its reverse, ^ The Charaka Club to Dr.
William Osier, medico illustri, literarum cultori, socio
gratissimoh He was subjected to undue banter regarding
‘ Oslerization which he bore cheerfully enough. Gracious !
Why should he not. Had not Sir Thomas Browne written
^ that piece of serene wisdom The Religio Medici at
thirty? And at the end, Weir Mitchell read a charming
poem, Books and the Man ^ a few stanzas of which may be
recalled : ^

Show me his friends and I the man shall know ;

This wiser turn a larger wisdom lends :

Show me the books he loves and I shall know
The man far better than through mortal friends.

Do you perchance recall when first we met — *

And gaily winged with thought the flying night
And won with ease the friendship of the mind, —

I like to call it friendship at first sight.

And then you found with us a second home,

And, in the practice of life’s happiest art,

You little guessed how readily you won
The added friendship of the open heart.

And now a score of years has fled away
In noble service of life’s highest ends.

And my glad capture of a London night
Disputes with me a continent of friends.

During all this, when not struggling over the Text-book
revision or being called upon in the last hour for important
consultations, he had been sitting, when time allowed, for
a bust to remain in Gilman Hall; for two subscription
portraits, one to hang in the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty,
and another for the University of Pennsylvania ; and
Miss Garrett was arranging with Mr. John S. Sargent for
a group picture of the four senior professors, to be presented

^ There is a brief account of this gathering in the British Medical Journal^
April I, 1905, i. 728.

2923«I

X X

The Fixed Period

674

Apr. 1905

to tlie Jolins Hopkins. Then there were at least three
important addresses still to prepare^ and in the midst
of it all he notes laconically in his account-book opposite
March 14-22 : Influenza in bed. Fever 4 days, pains in
joints & back. Coryza, larynx, bron.’

As usual he went to Atlantic City to recuperate, and put
up at one of the more obscure hotels, probably registering
under an assumed name if not that of E. Y. Davis ; but he
was back on April 3rd, and wrote to A. C. Klebs of Chicago :

Yes I am going to sail incog, but I do not mind telling you
we are going by the White Star Line, Cedric, on May 19th,
It would be delightful if you could join us.’

To i. F, Barker from W, O. Wednesday [April 5]

I have not had a moment free since yesterday morning to send you
a line of congratulation. Everyone here is much pleased, & I think
the way the announcement has been made has softened the dis-
appointment to Thayer. You will get a very hearty welcome from
Faculty & students, & you have so many friends in the profession heie
that it will be like coming home. I hope you will be able to come
on before I leave as there are many things to talk over & arrange.
The work of the clinic has grown enormously & the teaching has
increased to a serious degiee — the classes being largei this year than
we have ever had & next year the waids will be crowded. The private
work, so important for the hospital also glows & takes much time of
the 1st & 2nd assistant. In a way it is a burden but it is most essential
to foster for the income it brings to the Hospital. The heavy woik
of it must be thrown on the assistants — the chief cannot possibly do
more than give general direction. Of course Thayer, Futchei &
McCrae make a very strong trio. I do hope Mac will stay — he is
very strong as a teacher & full of sense. Futchei is a saint, you know
him well. Cole the ist assistant is a fine fellow. Emeison & Howard
could not be better & Boggs who has the bacteriology is A.i The
new din. room & your new rooms — a private one & two private
laboratories will be most convenient. Much leinains in the way of
organization for higher lines of work — & this you can do. If you
could come a couple of days befoie the Meeting in Washington it
would be nice or when you can. . .

The next week he was in the south for consultations- — ^in
Columbus, Georgia, in Savannah, in Richmond ; and the
following note to F. J. Shepherd tells of subsequent
peregrinations :

I am to be in Montreal on Friday the 14th and shall come up by

Aet 55

As You may Suppose 675

the Delaware & Hudson from New York. I have arranged with
Roddick that I am to talk to the students at 12 o’clock and have the
dinner in the evening. I shall have to leave on Saturday morning for
Toronto to say good-bye there. I am, as you may suppose, rushed
to death. I shall come directly to your house. Love to Cecil.

The usual Monday medical meeting of April 7th finds
him in attendance, taking part with W. G. MacCallum and
Rufus Cole in a symposium on Bronchiectasis as though
there was nothing out of the ordinary to occupy his mind.
He even finds time to write a commendatory review for the
American Journal of the Medical Sciences of H. D. Rolles-
ton’s recent volume on ‘ Diseases of the Liver ’ — or at least
E, Y. D. found time, for it was signed with these initials.

On April iith, a few days before he left to pay his
farewells in Montreal, a last meeting of the Stultifera Navis
Club was held, and as a parting gift he was given a magnifi-
cent copy of ‘ La Henriade ’ bound by Padeloup and
inscribed with a presentation verse from Voltaire to his
friend J. B. Silva, physician to Louis XV — a proper gift
to one who always acted himself on the principle that a true
bibliophile has a keen pleasure in seeing an important
document in its proper place — not necessarily in his own
library. To the existing inscription in the volume,
W. H. Buckler had added the following lines :

Your messmates in tlie Ship of Fools
Diink to your health and offer you
This product of the pen and tools
Of Voltaire and of Padeloup.

A famous leech received it then.

And now once more it feels content
Because in you it finds again
An owner no less eminent

In Montreal on the 14th, as he had written to Shepherd,
he gave the second of his three valedictories, which was
intended as a farewell to his former students, Canadian and
American.^ By this time one might know whereof he
would speak, and when the address came to be published

^ The address appears to have done double duty and to have been given
also at the University of Pennsylvania some time during the month.

The Student Life

676

Apr. 1905

there was prefixed to it from the Sermon on the Mount ;

^ Take therefore no thought for the morrow : for the
morrow shall take thought for the things of itself/ ^ The
Student Life ’ it was entitled, and from start to finish it
is an intimate though unconscious betrayal of Osier himself
and the things for which he had stood since those early days
in Weston when he first became aflame with a desire for
knowledge :

Almost everything has been renewed [he said] in the science and
in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries there has
been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential features of
the life which is our contemplation and our care. The sick love-child
of Israel’s sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the great
Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and
^ TuUy’s daughter mourned so tenderly are not of any age or any
race — they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias
and the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our
work is laid, and this eternal note of sadness would be insupportable
if the daily tragedies were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism
and devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain you more
potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as
perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life — the poetry of the
commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman,
with their loves and their joys, their soriows and their griefs. The
comedy, too, of life will be spread befoie you, and nobody laughs more
often than the doctor at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and
the Bottoms among his patients. The humorous side is really almost
as frequently turned towards him as the tragic. Lift up one hand to
heaven and thank your stars if they have given you the proper sense
to enable you to appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in
which we catch our fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one of the
free gifts of the gods, unevenly distributed, not bestowed on all,
or on all in equal proportions. In undue measure it is not without
risk, and in any case in the doctor it is better appreciated by the eye
than expressed on the tongue. Hilaiity and good humour, a breezy
cheerfulness, a nature ‘ sloping towards the sunny side as Lowell
has it, help enormously both in the study and in the practice of
medicine. To many of a sombre and sour disposition it is hard to
maintain good spirits amid the trials and tribulations of the day, and
yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go about among patients with
a long face.

Quotations do not suffice. It is an address to be read and
re-read, not only by every doctor young and old but by
those in any way interested in doctors, better by far than

Aet 55 Books, Balances, and Bairns 677

his other two valedictories 7 ‘ Of the well-stocked rooms
he said, * which it should be the ambition of every young
doctor to have in his house, the library, the laboratory, and
the nursery — books, balances, and bairns — as he may not
achieve all three I would urge him to start at any rate with
the books and the balances.’ And there followed advice
on reading, ^ on an avocation, on a ‘ quinquennial brain-
dusting ’, with a picture of the type of doctor needed in
the country districts — that best product of our profession.
At the close came some most touching paragraphs of
the long line of students whom he had taught and loved
and^ who had died prematurely — mentally, morally, or
bodily — the many young men whom he had loved and lost.

What happened at the undergraduates’ banquet in the
afternoon, where he again spoke, may be easily imagined ;
and later he met with his old friends of the ‘ Medico-Chi.’
and read a further paper on Aneurysm which smacks of his
activities of the ’70’s, while he was the boy-professor at
McGill. On leaving Montreal he paid a flying visit to
Toronto to say good-bye to his mother, and her parting
admonition to her youngest son was : ‘ Remember, Willie,
the shutters in England will rattle as they do in America.’
Rattling shutters, like idle tongues, are common to all places
and get on the nerves : human nature is much the same
everywhere. Was ever a lecture on patience, charity, and
tolerance better epitomized than in these few parting words
of Ellen Pickton Osier, then nearing her century-mark ?

In the account of those last few years in Baltimore, little
has been said of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty,
in whose behalf he had continued so assiduously to labour.
Its library had for the second time outgrown the quarters
provided for it and a movement was on foot to raise money
by popular subscription for a building suitable for a real
academy of medicine, which was to bear Osier’s name.
How this larger project fell through after his ‘ Fixed
Period’ address, because of the many subscriptions which
were withdrawn, need not be related, though it may be

^ Reprinted in ‘ Aequanimitas [&c.]’, and edition, 1906, as No. sx;
also, in part, by Christopher Morley in his selection of ‘ Modern Essays’.
N Y., Harcourt, Biace & Co., 1921.

678 Unity 5 Peace, and Concord Apr 1905

said that the main assembly-room of the new building when
finally erected was called Osier Hall. It was before this
society at their annual meeting that he gave on April zStli
the third of his valedictories as a farewell to the medical
profession of the United States.

He drew upon the Litany for his title ^ ; and to judge
from the manuscript, still preserved, from which he read,
it must have been an after- thought, as titles so often
are. Wanting a title the address as originally typewritten
became much interlined with script before its delivery, and
still more before its publication ; and when he came to add
the title he started to write ^ by James Bovell ’ instead of
^ by William Osier but checked himself.

, . , Centuiy after century from the altais of Christendom this most
beautiful of all prayers [the petition of the Litany] has risen from
lips of men and women, from the loyal souls who have refused to
recognize its hopelessness, with the war-drums ever sounding in their
ears. The desire for unity, the wish for peace, the longing for con-
cord, deeply implanted m the human heart, have stirred the most
powerful emotions of the lace, and have been responsible for some of
Its noblest actions. It is but a sentiment, you may say * but is not
the world ruled by feeling and by passion? What but a strong
sentiment baptized this nation in blood , and what but sentiment,
the deep-rooted affection for country which is so firmly implanted
in the hearts of all Americans, gives to these states to-day, unity, peace
and concord ? As with the nations at large, so with the nation in
particular ; as with people, so with individuals ; and as with our
profession, so with its members, this fine old prayer for unity, peace
and concord, if in our hearts as well on our lips, may help us to
realize its aspirations. What some of its lessons may be to us will
be the subject of my address.

They were the same old truths which he hammered home
in new guise ; the welding together of the profession to
promote unity by interstate reciprocity, by consolidation
of rival medical schools, by opening the door to the homoeo-
pathists ; before peace can be attained the physician, like
the Christian, must overcome the three great foes — ignorance
which is sin, apathy which is the world, and vice which is
the devil — and he prophetically added that ^ perhaps in

^ ^ Umly, Peace, and Concord ’ Repiinled in ‘ Aequammiias [&c.]
2nd edition, as No, XXI

Aet 55 His Parting Commandment 679

a few years our civilization may be put on trial and it will
not be without benefit . . • if it arouses communities from
an apathy which permits mediaeval conditions to prevail
without a protest \ Finally he spoke of the ways of pro-
moting concord in the profession by friendly intercourse^
by avoiding the vice of uncharitableness, ^ which Christ and
the Apostles lashed more unsparingly than any other ^ and
by listening to no wagging tongues : and he ended by
very happily appropriating the verses of Deut. xxx. 11-14
to a word unknown to their writer :

It may be that in the hurry and bustle of a busy life I have given
offence to some — who can avoid it ? Unwittingly I may have shot
an arrow o’er the house and hurt a brother — ^if so, I am sorry, and
I ask his pardon. So far as I can read my heart I leave you in charity
with all. I have striven with none, not, as Walter Savage Landor says,
because none was worth the strife, but because I have had a deep
conviction of the hatefulness of strife, of its uselessness, of its disastrous
effects, and a still deeper conviction of the blessings that come with
unity, peace and concord. And I would give to each of you, my
brothers — you who hear me now, and to you who may elsewhere read
my words — to you who do our greatest work labouring incessantly
for small rewards in towns and country places — to you the more
favoured ones who have special fields of work — to you teachers and
professors and scientific workers — to one and all, throughout the
length and breadth of the land — I give a single word as my parting
commandment :

^ It is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven,
that thou shouldest say. Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring
it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it ? Neither is it beyond the
sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring
it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it ? But the word is very nigh
unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it ’ —
Charity.

Naturally at the meeting Osier was the chief centre of
interest, but he had ways of his own of dodging personal
tributes ; so at a session of the assembled Delegates, recourse
was had to another method, and a telegram was sent to his
mother asking her to share the sentiments of the Medical
and Chirurgical Faculty in parting with her son, and
congratulating her, first, on his distinguished career, ^ but
most on the innate qualities which have endeared him to
his associates in Maryland.' To this came a reply from;

68o

Unity, Peace, and Concord Apr.-May 1905

83 Wellesley Street, Toronto, signed ‘ Jennette Osier
stating that Mrs. Osier, unable, because of her great age,
to write, had asked her to express her heartfelt thanks for
the messages which had given great pleasure : ‘ more

especially in the expression of affection and appreciation
called forth by the personal qualities of her son, since these
are in her eyes more precious than all his honours.’

A year or two before this time, a medical club of a dis-
tinctly new order had been started by a group of surgeons,
to the first meeting of which, held in Baltimore, Osier had
been invited. Struck by this novel organization, which had
equally great possibilities for the physicians, he was instru-
mental in launching a similar society, which came to be
called the Interurban Clinical Club, and which held its
first meeting in Baltimore on April 28-29 of this year. One
of the purposes of these clubs, which have since been widely
copied, is to introduce objective rather than subjective
methods of conveying information ; and at this first meeting
of the Interurban Club the Johns Hopkins medical clinic,
its teaching methods, its research problems, and so on,
were fully paraded. Those who made up the programme
naturally called upon Osier for several of its events. Accord-
ingly the guests attended one of his celebrated Saturday-
noon amphitheatre clinics for the third- and fourth-year
students ; he also held an out-patient clinic for them, and
made, for what was to be practically the last time at the
Hopkins, one of his famous ward visits — for perhaps the
last time, too, he was host at the Maryland Club for a large
dinner that evening.

One episode of this ward visit has been recalled. The new
club having brought to Baltimore a group of the younger
leaders of the profession, more than the usual queue of
students followed him into the ward, crowding around the
bedside where he stopped. ‘ Whose case is this ? ’ said
Osier. ‘ Mine, sir,’ replied the fourth-year clerk stepping
forward. ‘ Well, Mr. Freeman, what is the first thing
you would do in examining this patient ? ’ With some
trepidation Mr. F. chanced : ‘ Take the history, sir.’ ‘No,
that ’s already been done ; what next ? ’ Mr. F., thinking to
make a hit, replied : ‘ Inspect the patient.’ ‘ Not yet ’, said

Aet ss

68i

Just now in Oxford

Osier ; ‘ what before that? ’ Mr. F. gives it up. ‘ Well,
the first thing to do is to ask Dr. Lambert to stand out of
the light.’

Plans meanwhile were being laid in England for Osier’s

reception, as the following letter from J. Burdon Sanderson

indicates : r j /

Oxford, May 2/05.

My dear Osier, — By the time you receive this I shall be performing
my last duty as Reg. Professor — that of presenting for the Degree of
D.M. a very able candidate, Mr. Turnbull. The only other matter
that I shall have to concern myself with is the bidding farewell to the
"old men in the Almshouse at Ewelme. This I will do as soon as we get
anything like summer weather. Just now Oxford looks very beautiful
when the sun shines but we have as yet had very little of this enjoy-
ment. In a month we hope to have the pleasure of welcoming you
and Mrs. Osier. I am anxious to engage you for Friday, June 9, when
we think of asking aU and sundry to Magdalen College Hall. There
will no doubt be other plans for entertaining you but I dare say none
of the same kind. I am very glad to hear that you have arranged to
occupy Prof. Max Muller’s house during the summer. Our plan will
be to see as much of the summer as we can. During our long life we
have scarcely seen anything of England during the months that it is
most beautiful — June and July. Freedom to enjoy the long days
may be some compensation for many drawbacks.

On the day this letter of welcome was written in Oxford
a great subscription dinner was held at the Waldorf-Astoria
in N ew Y ork to bid Osier farewell. At this dinner, organized
by a committee of eighty who represented the leaders of the
profession of Canada and the United States, there were some
five-hundred participants from aU over the continent. His
old Philadelphia friend James Tyson presided ; F. J. Shep-
herd spoke of Osier in Montreal, J. C. Wilson of Osier in
Philadelphia, Welch of Osier in Baltimore, and Abraham
Jacobi ‘ of the author and physician ’, till the victim writhed
in his seat. Finally, in introducing Weir Mitchell, Tyson
said ‘ the oldest and youngest authorities on old age are to
be brought into intimate communion ’ ; and Dr. Mitchell,
with some appropriate, amusing, and affectionate phrases
presented Osier with Logan’s translation of the ‘ De
Senectute ’, printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1744' Osier
followed, though to age and the ‘ Fixed Period ’ he made
no allusion. He spoke intimately of the happiness of his

682 1/ Envoi Ma) 1905

life — happiness which had come to him in many forms — in
his friends ; in his profession ; in the public among whom
he had worked both in Canada and the land of his adoption ;
in his home. With evident depth of feeling lightened only
once with the usual touch of humour, he said just the right
things about his affiliations with the profession and with his
students, about his ambitions, and lastly, at the end, about
his ideals :

I have three personal ideals. One, to do the day’s work well and
not to bother about tomorrow. It has been urged that this is not
a satisfactory ideal. It is ; and there is not one which the student
can carry with him into practice with greater effect. To it, more than
to anything else, I owe whatever success I have had — to this poiver
of settling down to the day’s Avork and trying to do it well to the best
of one’s ability, and letting the future take care of itself.

The second ideal has been to act the Golden Rule, as far as in me
lay, towaids my professional brethren and towaids the patients
committed to my care.

And the third has been to cultivate such a measuie of equanimity
as would enable me to bear success with humility, the affection of my
friends without pride, and to be ready when the day of sorrow and
grief came to meet it with the courage befitting a man.

What the future has in stoie for me, I cannot tell — you cannot
tell. Nor do I much care, so long as I carry with me, as I shall,
the memory of the past you have given me. Nothing can take
that away.

I have made mistakes, but they have been mistakes of the head not
of the heart, I can truly say, and I take upon myself to witness, that
in my sojourn with you —

I have loved no darkness,

Sophisticated no truth,

Nursed no delusion,

Allowed no fear.

To these his parting words, when published later on, he
prefixed the line from Tennyson’s ^ Ulysses ’ : ' I am a part
of all that I have met.’ Almost never did Osier betray his
deeper feelings by any show of sentiment. His friends were
well aware of this ; it is a subject touched upon in a letter
from Trudeau written only a few days after this dinner
which he could not attend. Osier had sent for him to read
a charming book by Stephen Paget — opportunely, Trudeau
says, for it came at a time when he was low in mind from

Aet. 55 Early the Next Morning 683

a relapse which had kept him for two months confined to
his room and porch :

... I enjoyed ^ Confessio Medici ’ immensely [lie adds] but it seems
to me the author might easily write his name William Osier so much
in it is so like you. The chapteis about ‘ retirement ’ pleased me
most as they naturally appeal to me most. Velox and Prudens each
struggling against disability in their own way are real and pathetic
types. The book gives the student with startling clearness, the main
features of the doctor’s life, its achievements, and disappointments,
and what it says about the possibilities of the professor of medicine
it says admirably, but does it say all ? Are there no other ideals than
‘efficiency and success ? I know you hate sentiment, but with some
of us sentiment stands for a good deal and is a real factor in the
problems of life : it is often the very spirit of that mysterious ^ ego ’
which governs our actions and shapes our lives after certain ideals,
and to my mind no field offers such possibilities for the development
of high ideals as does the medical profession. Excuse my rattling on
in this way. I hope I may see you at the Congress if I am better by
that time.

On Sunday the 15 th Osier wrote his last notes from the
corner of Franklin Street, and with a small handbag he left
on the following morning for the meeting in Washington,
leaving the bustle of packing-cases behind him, and escaping
the sly remark that ^ Willie’s motto may well be aequanimt-
tas because he always flees when things like this are going
on h He was not seen again by his family till they met for
dinner three days later in New York. Meanwhile in these
three days, the old Hoffman house, for seventy-five years
a landmark in Baltimore, was emptied of its contents, and
she who had been matron thereof for thirteen years, with
the reaction of a New England housekeeper, finally intro-
duced a battalion of scrubwomen who scoured it from attic
to cellar — this, despite the fact that its demolition to make
way for an ugly apartment-house was to begin early the
next morning. Furniture, books, china, pictures, and
* memorabilia of all sorts not destined for Oxford, had been
given away to people who would treasure them. The huge
sideboard, for example, relic of the senior Gross and known
as ^ the grandstand a familiar sight to the legions of people
who had broken bread at the table before it, went to the
dining-room at the J. H. H. ; one of the ^ latch-keyers ’
inherited his desk, another his book-cases, another his

L' Envoi

May 1905

6B4

favourite chair ; and to another went a set of the first
twenty Atlantic Monthlies with ‘St. Robert’ Winthrop
canonized in a vignette on the back of the familiar old
black-cloth covers. On the fly-leaf of vol. i, 1858, containing
‘ The Autocrat the following lines had been inscribed :

‘ This set came from Phila with the Widow Gross when she
undertook the care & education of one Egerton Yorrick
Davis to whom the volumes were a daily comfort at break-
fast at I West Franklin St. Baltimore ’ ; and finally, as the
curtain fell on the Wednesday, some one unscrewed and
took away the unpretentious ‘ Dr. Osier ’ door-plate, behind
which for all these years the faithful Morris had stood to
■welcome many a patient and many a friend.

Trudeau fortunately was well enough to attend the
meetings in Washington — indeed, he was President that
year of two societies Osier had helped to found — of the
Association of Physicians, and of a younger society as well.
He thus speaks of the occasion in his autobiography :

When the National Association for the Study and Prevention of
Tuberculosis, in ■which Dr. Osier was so prominent, was formed,
I met him regularly at the early committee meetings, and it was no
doubt greatly through his influence that I was elected the first
president of this splendid national movement against tuberculosis.
It was another red-letter day in my life when, at the first meeting
of this National Association, in Washington on May 18, 1905 , 1 stood
on the platform with Dr. Osier and Dr. Hermann M. Biggs and
addressed the great, earnest body of physicians and laymen before me.

The ‘ Physicians ’ met on the i6th and 17th, and in his
presidential address on the opening day, Trudeau very
feelingly spoke of Osier’s departure in the usual terms :
‘ brilliant attainments ’, ‘ indefatigable energy ‘ genial
disposition ‘ striking personality ’, and so on, adding that
‘ after he has left us his heart will by no means be the only
one to show “ cardiac cicatrices ” ’ — an allusion to some-
thing Osier had said in a recent address. Osier probably
was writing ‘ James Bovell ’ on a pad while this eulogy was
delivered, and later took part in the discussion of some of the
scientific papers as though his work in America was just
beginning instead of ending.

And so it was with the meeting of the N. A. S. P. T., to

Aet 55 The Last May Meetings 685

which Trudeau referred — a red-letter day when not only
he but Osier and Biggs as Vice-Presidents all gave addresses.
Osier particularly stressed the further education of both
public and patient, saying that ‘ no greater mistdce is
possible in the treatment of tuberculosis than to keep from
the patient in its early stages the full knowledge of its
existence ’ — a radical point of view for those days. A long
programme of scientific papers followed, and thus this very
successful and important society was launched. With it
from the outset Osier had had much to do, and now he must
begin all over again in a similar campaign of education in
Oxfordshire.

He had somehow during this time finished the revision for
the 6th edition of his Text-book, and in the preface dated
May 17th ^ and therefore possibly penned in Washington,
he says ‘ so many sections have been rewritten and so many
alterations made that in many respects this is a new book
This done, and leaving it with W. W. Francis to see
through the press, he fled to New York. In his account-
book, sometime or other, he subsequently wrote the follow-
ing brief note :

Sailed from New York on the Cedric on the 19th almost dead !
Arrived in Oxford Saturday evening [May 27th], went directly to
Mrs. Max Muller’s house 7 Norham Gardens wliich we had taken
furnished. I was blue as indigo for the first two or three days. I was
thoroughly worn out and it was six weeks or more before I felt
myself.

^ To show the necessity of these constant revisions it may be noted that
on this very day, May 17th, a paper by Schaudinn and Hoffmann was read
before the Berlin Medical Society, modestly announcing the discovery of the
Spirochaete pallida as the cause of syphilis — 3. discovery almost as important
as that made by Koch twenty-three years before, of the tubercle bacillus.

® It was this (6th) edition that provoked the amusing doggerel poem signed
‘ S. S.’ — ‘ The Student’s Guide to Osier ’ that appeared in the Guy’s Hospital
Gazette for Oct. z, 1907, ii. 240 ‘ S. S.’ was a brilliant Cambridge and Guy’s

man, H. O. Brockhouse, who died in 1917

END OF VOLUME I

PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS